half a century, which has been the only serious danger that has threatened our institutions,—­I say, where is the philosophy or the statesmanship based on the assumption that we are to quit talking about it, and that the public mind is all at once to cease being agitated by it?  Yet this is the policy here in the North that Douglas is advocating, that we are to care nothing about it!  I ask you if it is not a false philosophy.  Is it not a false statesmanship that undertakes to build up a system of policy upon the basis of caring nothing about the very thing that everybody does care the most about—­a thing which all experience has shown we care a very great deal about?

The Judge alludes very often in the course of his remarks to the exclusive right which the States have to decide the whole thing for themselves.  I agree with him very readily that the different States have that right.  He is but fighting a man of straw when he assumes that I am contending against the right of the States to do as they please about it.  Our controversy with him is in regard to the new Territories.  We agree that when the States come in as States they have the right and the power to do as they please.  We have no power as citizens of the free-States, or in our Federal capacity as members of the Federal Union through the General Government, to disturb slavery in the States where it exists.  We profess constantly that we have no more inclination than belief in the power of the government to disturb it; yet we are driven constantly to defend ourselves from the assumption that we are warring upon the rights of the Sates.  What I insist upon is, that the new Territories shall be kept free from it while in the Territorial condition.  Judge Douglas assumes that we have no interest in them,—­that we have no right whatever to interfere.  I think we have some interest.  I think that as white men we have.  Do we not wish for an outlet for our surplus population, if I may so express myself?  Do we not feel an interest in getting to that outlet with such institutions as we would like to have prevail there?  If you go to the Territory opposed to slavery, and another man comes upon the same ground with his slave, upon the assumption that the things are equal, it turns out that he has the equal right all his way, and you have no part of it your way.  If he goes in and makes it a slave Territory, and by consequence a slave State, is it not time that those who desire to have it a free State were on equal ground?  Let me suggest it in a different way.  How many Democrats are there about here ["A thousand”] who have left slave States and come into the free State of Illinois to get rid of the institution of slavery? [Another voice:  “A thousand and one.”] I reckon there are a thousand and one.  I will ask you, if the policy you are now advocating had prevailed when this country was in a Territorial condition, where would you have gone to get rid of it?  Where would you have found your free State or Territory to go to?  And when hereafter, for any cause, the people in this place shall desire to find new homes, if they wish to be rid of the institution, where will they find the place to go to?