He said I had a hand in passing them, in his opening speech, that I was in the convention and helped to pass them.  Do the resolutions touch me at all?  It strikes me there is some difference between holding a man responsible for an act which he has not done and holding him responsible for an act that he has done.  You will judge whether there is any difference in the “spots.”  And he has taken credit for great magnanimity in coming forward and acknowledging what is proved on him beyond even the capacity of Judge Douglas to deny; and he has more capacity in that way than any other living man.

Then he wants to know why I won’t withdraw the charge in regard to a conspiracy to make slavery national, as he has withdrawn the one he made.  May it please his worship, I will withdraw it when it is proven false on me as that was proven false on him.  I will add a little more than that, I will withdraw it whenever a reasonable man shall be brought to believe that the charge is not true.  I have asked Judge Douglas’s attention to certain matters of fact tending to prove the charge of a conspiracy to nationalize slavery, and he says he convinces me that this is all untrue because Buchanan was not in the country at that time, and because the Dred Scott case had not then got into the Supreme Court; and he says that I say the Democratic owners of Dred Scott got up the case.  I never did say that I defy Judge Douglas to show that I ever said so, for I never uttered it. [One of Mr. Douglas’s reporters gesticulated affirmatively at Mr. Lincoln.] I don’t care if your hireling does say I did, I tell you myself that I never said the “Democratic” owners of Dred Scott got up the case.  I have never pretended to know whether Dred Scott’s owners were Democrats, or Abolitionists, or Freesoilers or Border Ruffians.  I have said that there is evidence about the case tending to show that it was a made-up case, for the purpose of getting that decision.  I have said that that evidence was very strong in the fact that when Dred Scott was declared to be a slave, the owner of him made him free, showing that he had had the case tried and the question settled for such use as could be made of that decision; he cared nothing about the property thus declared to be his by that decision.  But my time is out, and I can say no more.

LAST DEBATE,

AT ALTON, OCTOBER 15, 1858

Mr. Lincoln’s reply

Ladies and gentlemen:—­I have been somewhat, in my own mind, complimented by a large portion of Judge Douglas’s speech,—­I mean that portion which he devotes to the controversy between himself and the present Administration.  This is the seventh time Judge Douglas and myself have met in these joint discussions, and he has been gradually improving in regard to his war with the Administration.  At Quincy, day before yesterday, he was a little more severe upon the Administration than I had heard him