is the first time in my
life that I have appeared before an audience in so great a city as this:
I therefore--though I am no longer a young man--make this appearance
under some degree of embarrassment. But I have found that when one is
embarrassed, usually the shortest way to get through with it is to quit
talking or thinking about it, and go at something else.

I understand that you have had recently with you my very distinguished
friend Judge Douglas, of Illinois; and I understand, without having had
an opportunity (not greatly sought, to be sure) of seeing a report of the
speech that he made here, that he did me the honor to mention my humble
name. I suppose that he did so for the purpose of making some objection to
some sentiment at some time expressed by me. I should expect, it is true,
that judge Douglas had reminded you, or informed you, if you had never
before heard it, that I had once in my life declared it as my opinion that
this government cannot endure permanently, half slave and half free; that
a house divided against itself cannot stand, and, as I had expressed it,
I did not expect the house to fall, that I did not expect the Union to be
dissolved, but that I did expect that it would cease to be divided, that
it would become all one thing, or all the other; that either the opponents
of slavery would arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the
public mind would rest in the belief that it was in the course of ultimate
extinction, or the friends of slavery will push it forward until it
becomes alike lawful in all the States, old or new, free as well as slave.
I did, fifteen months ago, express that opinion, and upon many occasions
Judge Douglas has denounced it, and has greatly, intentionally or
unintentionally, misrepresented my purpose in the expression of that
opinion.

I presume, without having seen a report of his speech, that he did
so here. I presume that he alluded also to that opinion, in different
language, having been expressed at a subsequent time by Governor Seward of
New York, and that he took the two in a lump and denounced them; that he
tried to point out that there was something couched in this opinion which
led to the making of an entire uniformity of the local institutions of the
various States of the Union, in utter disregard of the different States,
which in their nature would seem to require a variety of institutions
and a variety of laws, conforming to the differences in th