But Douglas says that he is unalterably opposed to the repeal of those laws because, in his view, it is a compromise of the Constitution.  You Kentuckians, no doubt, are somewhat offended with that.  You ought not to be!  You ought to be patient!  You ought to know that if he said less than that, he would lose the power of “lugging” the Northern States to your support.  Really, what you would push him to do would take from him his entire power to serve you.  And you ought to remember how long, by precedent, Judge Douglas holds himself obliged to stick by compromises.  You ought to remember that by the time you yourselves think you are ready to inaugurate measures for the revival of the African slave trade, that sufficient time will have arrived, by precedent, for Judge Douglas to break through, that compromise.  He says now nothing more strong than he said in 1849 when he declared in favor of Missouri Compromise,—­and precisely four years and a quarter after he declared that Compromise to be a sacred thing, which “no ruthless hand would ever daze to touch,” he himself brought forward the measure ruthlessly to destroy it.  By a mere calculation of time it will only be four years more until he is ready to take back his profession about the sacredness of the Compromise abolishing the slave trade.  Precisely as soon as you are ready to have his services in that direction, by fair calculation, you may be sure of having them.

But you remember and set down to Judge Douglas’s debt, or discredit, that he, last year, said the people of Territories can, in spite of the Dred Scott decision, exclude your slaves from those Territories; that he declared, by “unfriendly legislation” the extension of your property into the new Territories may be cut off, in the teeth of the decision of the Supreme Court of the United States.

He assumed that position at Freeport on the 27th of August, 1858.  He said that the people of the Territories can exclude slavery, in so many words:  You ought, however, to bear in mind that he has never said it since.  You may hunt in every speech that he has since made, and he has never used that expression once.  He has never seemed to notice that he is stating his views differently from what he did then; but by some sort of accident, he has always really stated it differently.  He has always since then declared that “the Constitution does not carry slavery into the Territories of the United States beyond the power of the people legally to control it, as other property.”  Now, there is a difference in the language used upon that former occasion and in this latter day.  There may or may not be a difference in the meaning, but it is worth while considering whether there is not also a difference in meaning.