een reached and
passed. 'A house divided against itself cannot stand.' I believe
this Government cannot endure permanently, half slave and half
free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved--I do not expect
the house to fall--but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It
will become all one thing or all the other. Either the opponents
of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it
where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in
course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it
forward till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old
as well as new, North as well as South."

Then followed his demonstration, through the incidents of the Nebraska
legislation, the Dred Scott decision, and present political theories
and issues, which would by and by find embodiment in new laws and
future legal doctrines. The repeal of the Missouri Compromise, the
language of the Nebraska bill, which declared slavery "subject to the
Constitution," the Dred Scott decision, which declared that "subject
to the Constitution" neither Congress nor a Territorial Legislature
could exclude slavery from a Territory--the argument presented point
by point and step by step with legal precision the silent subversion
of cherished principles of liberty. "Put this and that together," said
he, "and we have another nice little niche, which we may ere long see
filled with another Supreme Court decision, declaring that the
Constitution of the United States does not permit a State to exclude
slavery from its limits.... Such a decision is all that slavery now
lacks of being alike lawful in all the States.... We shall lie down,"
continued the orator, "pleasantly dreaming that the people of Missouri
are on the verge of making their State free; and we shall awake to the
reality instead, that the Supreme Court has made Illinois a slave
State."

His peroration was a battle-call: "Our cause, then, must be intrusted
to and conducted by its own undoubted friends, those whose hands are
free, whose hearts are in the work, who do care for the result. Two
years ago the Republicans of the nation mustered over thirteen hundred
thousand strong. We did this under the single impulse of resistance to
a common danger, with every external circumstance against us. Of
strange, discordant, and even hostile elements we gathered from the
four winds, and formed and fought the battle through, under t