tter sovereignty."

Now, I wish you to mark, What has become of that squatter sovereignty?
What has become of it? Can you get anybody to tell you now that the
people of a Territory have any authority to govern themselves, in regard
to this mooted question of slavery, before they form a State
constitution? No such thing at all, although there is a general running
fire, and although there has been a hurrah made in every speech on that
side, assuming that policy had given to the people of a Territory the
right to govern themselves upon this question; yet the point is dodged.
To-day it has been decided--no more than a year ago it was decided by
the Supreme Court of the United States, and is insisted upon
to-day--that the people of a Territory have no right to exclude slavery
from a Territory; that if any one man chooses to take slaves into a
Territory, all the rest of the people have no right to keep them out.
This being so, and this decision being made, one of the points that the
Judge approved, and one in the approval of which he says he means to
keep me down,--_put_ me down I should not say, for I have never been up!
He says he is in favour of it, and sticks to it, and expects to win his
battle on that decision, which says that there is no such thing as
squatter sovereignty, but that any one man may take slaves into a
Territory, and all the other men in the Territory may be opposed to it,
and yet by reason of the Constitution they cannot prohibit it. When that
is so, how much is left of this vast matter of squatter sovereignty, I
should like to know?

When we get back, we get to the point of the right of the people to make
a constitution. Kansas was settled, for example, in 1854. It was a
Territory yet, without having formed a constitution, in a very regular
way, for three years. All this time negro slavery could be taken in by
any few individuals, and by that decision of the Supreme Court, which
the Judge approves, all the rest of the people cannot keep it out; but
when they come to make a constitution they may say they will not have
slavery. But it is there; they are obliged to tolerate it in some way,
and all experience shows it will be so,--for they will not take the
negro slaves and absolutely deprive the owners of them. All experience
shows this to be so. All that space of time that runs from the beginning
of the settlement of the Territory until there is a sufficiency of
people to make a State constitution,--all