r
domestic relations, including that of slavery, I agree entirely with him.
He places me wrong in spite of all I can tell him, though I repeat it
again and again, insisting that I have no difference with him upon this
subject. I have made a great many speeches, some of which have been
printed, and it will be utterly impossible for him to find anything that
I have ever put in print contrary to what I now say upon this subject. I
hold myself under constitutional obligations to allow the people in all
the States, without interference, direct or indirect, to do exactly as
they please; and I deny that I have any inclination to interfere with
them, even if there were no such constitutional obligation. I can only say
again that I am placed improperly--altogether improperly, in spite of all
I can say--when it is insisted that I entertain any other view or purposes
in regard to that matter.

While I am upon this subject, I will make some answers briefly to certain
propositions that Judge Douglas has put. He says, "Why can't this Union
endure permanently half slave and half free?" I have said that I supposed
it could not, and I will try, before this new audience, to give briefly
some of the reasons for entertaining that opinion. Another form of his
question is, "Why can't we let it stand as our fathers placed it?" That is
the exact difficulty between us. I say that Judge Douglas and his friends
have changed it from the position in which our fathers originally placed
it. I say, in the way our father's originally left the slavery question,
the institution was in the course of ultimate extinction, and the
public mind rested in the belief that it was in the course of ultimate
extinction. I say when this government was first established it was the
policy of its founders to prohibit the spread of slavery into the new
Territories of the United States, where it had not existed. But Judge
Douglas and his friends have broken up that policy, and placed it upon
a new basis, by which it is to become national and perpetual. All I have
asked or desired anywhere is that it should be placed back again upon the
basis that the fathers of our government originally placed it upon. I have
no doubt that it would become extinct, for all time to come, if we but
readopted the policy of the fathers, by restricting it to the limits it
has already covered, restricting it from the new Territories.

I do not wish to dwell at great length on this branch of the