olted in with a lock of a hundred keys, which can
never be unlocked without the concurrence of every key--the keys in
the hands of a hundred different men, and they scattered to a hundred
different and distant places; and they stand musing as to what
invention, in all the dominions of mind and matter, can be produced to
make the impossibility of his escape more complete than it is.

It is grossly incorrect to say or assume that the public estimate of the
negro is more favorable now than it was at the origin of the government.

Three years and a half ago, Judge Douglas brought forward his famous
Nebraska bill. The country was at once in a blaze. He scorned all
opposition, and carried it through Congress. Since then he has seen
himself superseded in a presidential nomination by one indorsing the
general doctrine of his measure, but at the same time standing clear
of the odium of its untimely agitation and its gross breach of national
faith; and he has seen that successful rival constitutionally elected,
not by the strength of friends, but by the division of adversaries,
being in a popular minority of nearly four hundred thousand votes.
He has seen his chief aids in his own State, Shields and Richardson,
politically speaking, successively tried, convicted, and executed, for
an offense not their own, but his. And now he sees his own case standing
next on the docket for trial.

There is a natural disgust in the minds of nearly all white people at
the idea of an indiscriminate amalgamation of the white and black races;
and Judge Douglas evidently is basing his chief hope upon the chances of
his being able to appropriate the benefit of this disgust to himself.
If he can, by much drumming and repeating, fasten the odium of that idea
upon his adversaries, he thinks he can struggle through the storm. He
therefore clings to this hope, as a drowning man to the last plank.
He makes an occasion for lugging it in from the opposition to the Dred
Scott decision. He finds the Republicans insisting that the Declaration
of Independence includes all men, black as well as white, and forthwith
he boldly denies that it includes negroes at all, and proceeds to argue
gravely that all who contend it does, do so only because they want to
vote, and eat, and sleep, and marry with negroes. He will have it that
they cannot be consistent else. Now I protest against the counterfeit
logic which concludes that, because I do not want a black woman for a