manently half slave and half free;
yet I do not admit, nor does it at all follow, that the admission of a
single slave State will permanently fix the character and establish this
as a universal slave nation. The Judge is very happy indeed at working up
these quibbles. Before leaving the subject of answering questions, I aver
as my confident belief, when you come to see our speeches in print, that
you will find every question which he has asked me more fairly and boldly
and fully answered than he has answered those which I put to him. Is not
that so? The two speeches may be placed side by side, and I will venture
to leave it to impartial judges whether his questions have not been more
directly and circumstantially answered than mine.

Judge Douglas says he made a charge upon the editor of the Washington
Union, alone, of entertaining a purpose to rob the States of their power
to exclude slavery from their limits. I undertake to say, and I make the
direct issue, that he did not make his charge against the editor of the
Union alone. I will undertake to prove by the record here that he made
that charge against more and higher dignitaries than the editor of the
Washington Union. I am quite aware that he was shirking and dodging around
the form in which he put it, but I can make it manifest that he leveled
his "fatal blow" against more persons than this Washington editor. Will he
dodge it now by alleging that I am trying to defend Mr. Buchanan against
the charge? Not at all. Am I not making the same charge myself? I am
trying to show that you, Judge Douglas, are a witness on my side. I am not
defending Buchanan, and I will tell Judge Douglas that in my opinion, when
he made that charge, he had an eye farther north than he has to-day. He
was then fighting against people who called him a Black Republican and
an Abolitionist. It is mixed all through his speech, and it is tolerably
manifest that his eye was a great deal farther north than it is to-day.
The Judge says that though he made this charge, Toombs got up and declared
there was not a man in the United States, except the editor of the Union,
who was in favor of the doctrines put forth in that article. And thereupon
I understand that the Judge withdrew the charge. Although he had taken
extracts from the newspaper, and then from the Lecompton Constitution, to
show the existence of a conspiracy to bring about a "fatal blow," by which
the States were to be deprived of the right o