the Nebraska Bill! I am fighting it upon these "original principles,"
fighting it in the Jeffersonian, Washingtonian, and Madisonian fashion.

Now, my friends, I wish you to attend for a little while to one or two
other things in that Springfield speech. My main object was to show, so
far as my humble ability was capable of showing, to the people of this
country what I believed was the truth,--that there was a tendency, if not
a conspiracy, among those who have engineered this slavery question for
the last four or five years, to make slavery perpetual and universal in
this nation. Having made that speech principally for that object, after
arranging the evidences that I thought tended to prove my proposition, I
concluded with this bit of comment:

"We cannot absolutely know that these exact adaptations are the result of
preconcert; but when we see a lot of framed timbers, different portions of
which we know have been gotten out at different times and places, and by
different workmen--Stephen, Franklin, Roger, and James, for instance,--and
when we see these timbers joined together, and see they exactly make the
frame of a house or a mill, all the tenons and mortises exactly fitting,
and all the lengths and proportions of the different pieces exactly
adapted to their respective places, and not a piece too many or too
few,--not omitting even the scaffolding,--or if a single piece be lacking,
we see the place in the frame exactly fitted and prepared yet to bring
such piece in,--in such a case we feel it impossible not to believe that
Stephen and Franklin and Roger and James all understood one another from
the beginning, and all worked upon a common plan or draft drawn before the
first blow was struck."

When my friend Judge Douglas came to Chicago on the 9th of July, this
speech having been delivered on the 16th of June, he made an harangue
there, in which he took hold of this speech of mine, showing that he had
carefully read it; and while he paid no attention to this matter at all,
but complimented me as being a "kind, amiable, and intelligent gentleman,"
notwithstanding I had said this, he goes on and eliminates, or draws out,
from my speech this tendency of mine to set the States at war with one
another, to make all the institutions uniform, and set the niggers and
white people to marrying together. Then, as the Judge had complimented me
with these pleasant titles (I must confess to my weakness), I was a little
"taken,