Now, having established with his entire party this doctrine, having been entirely successful in that branch of his efforts in your behalf, he is ready for another.

At this same meeting at Memphis he declared that in all contests between the negro and the white man he was for the white man, but that in all questions between the negro and the crocodile he was for the negro.  He did not make that declaration accidentally at Memphis.  He made it a great many times in the canvass in Illinois last year (though I don’t know that it was reported in any of his speeches there, but he frequently made it).  I believe he repeated it at Columbus, and I should not wonder if he repeated it here.  It is, then, a deliberate way of expressing himself upon that subject.  It is a matter of mature deliberation with him thus to express himself upon that point of his case.  It therefore requires deliberate attention.

The first inference seems to be that if you do not enslave the negro, you are wronging the white man in some way or other, and that whoever is opposed to the negro being enslaved, is, in some way or other, against the white man.  Is not that a falsehood?  If there was a necessary conflict between the white man and the negro, I should be for the white man as much as Judge Douglas; but I say there is no such necessary conflict.  I say that there is room enough for us all to be free, and that it not only does not wrong the white man that the negro should be free, but it positively wrongs the mass of the white men that the negro should be enslaved; that the mass of white men are really injured by the effects of slave labor in the vicinity of the fields of their own labor.

But I do not desire to dwell upon this branch of the question more than to say that this assumption of his is false, and I do hope that that fallacy will not long prevail in the minds of intelligent white men.  At all events, you ought to thank Judge Douglas for it; it is for your benefit it is made.

The other branch of it is, that in the struggle between the negro and the crocodile; he is for the negro.  Well, I don’t know that there is any struggle between the negro and the crocodile, either.  I suppose that if a crocodile (or, as we old Ohio River boatmen used to call them, alligators) should come across a white man, he would kill him if he could; and so he would a negro.  But what, at last, is this proposition?  I believe it is a sort of proposition in proportion, which may be stated thus:  “As the negro is to the white man, so is the crocodile to the negro; and as the negro may rightfully treat the crocodile as a beast or reptile, so the white man may rightfully treat the negro as a beast or a reptile.”  That is really the “knip” of all that argument of his.

Now, my brother Kentuckians, who believe in this, you ought to thank Judge Douglas for having put that in a much more taking way than any of yourselves have done.