Again:  I have alluded in the beginning of these remarks to the fact that Judge Douglas has made great complaint of my having expressed the opinion that this government “cannot endure permanently, half slave and half free.”  He has complained of Seward for using different language, and declaring that there is an “irrepressible conflict” between the principles of free and slave labor. [A voice:  “He says it is not original with Seward.  That it is original with Lincoln.”] I will attend to that immediately, sir.  Since that time, Hickman of Pennsylvania expressed the same sentiment.  He has never denounced Mr. Hickman:  why?  There is a little chance, notwithstanding that opinion in the mouth of Hickman, that he may yet be a Douglas man.  That is the difference!  It is not unpatriotic to hold that opinion if a man is a Douglas man.

But neither I, nor Seward, nor Hickman is entitled to the enviable or unenviable distinction of having first expressed that idea.  That same idea was expressed by the Richmond Enquirer, in Virginia, in 1856,—­quite two years before it was expressed by the first of us.  And while Douglas was pluming himself that in his conflict with my humble self, last year, he had “squelched out” that fatal heresy, as he delighted to call it, and had suggested that if he only had had a chance to be in New York and meet Seward he would have “squelched” it there also, it never occurred to him to breathe a word against Pryor.  I don’t think that you can discover that Douglas ever talked of going to Virginia to “squelch” out that idea there.  No.  More than that.  That same Roger A. Pryor was brought to Washington City and made the editor of the par excellence Douglas paper, after making use of that expression, which, in us, is so unpatriotic and heretical.  From all this, my Kentucky friends may see that this opinion is heretical in his view only when it is expressed by men suspected of a desire that the country shall all become free, and not when expressed by those fairly known to entertain the desire that the whole country shall become slave.  When expressed by that class of men, it is in nowise offensive to him.  In this again, my friends of Kentucky, you have Judge Douglas with you.

There is another reason why you Southern people ought to nominate Douglas at your convention at Charleston.  That reason is the wonderful capacity of the man,—­the power he has of doing what would seem to be impossible.  Let me call your attention to one of these apparently impossible things: 

Douglas had three or four very distinguished men of the most extreme anti-slavery views of any men in the Republican party expressing their desire for his re-election to the Senate last year.  That would, of itself, have seemed to be a little wonderful; but that wonder is heightened when we see that Wise of Virginia, a man exactly opposed to them, a man who believes in the divine right of slavery, was also expressing his desire that Douglas should be reelected;