"I swear by
the court; I give it up"; and while that is going on he has been getting
all his men to swear by the courts, and to give it up with him. In this
again he serves you faithfully, and, as I say, more wisely than you serve
yourselves.

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.