subject at
this time, but allow me to repeat one thing that I have stated before.
Brooks--the man who assaulted Senator Sumner on the floor of the
Senate, and who was complimented with dinners, and silver pitchers, and
gold-headed canes, and a good many other things for that feat--in one
of his speeches declared that when this government was originally
established, nobody expected that the institution of slavery would last
until this day. That was but the opinion of one man, but it was such an
opinion as we can never get from Judge Douglas or anybody in favor of
slavery, in the North, at all. You can sometimes get it from a Southern
man. He said at the same time that the framers of our government did not
have the knowledge that experience has taught us; that experience and
the invention of the cotton-gin have taught us that the perpetuation of
slavery is a necessity. He insisted, therefore, upon its being changed
from the basis upon which the fathers of the government left it to the
basis of its perpetuation and nationalization.

I insist that this is the difference between Judge Douglas and
myself,--that Judge Douglas is helping that change along. I insist upon
this government being placed where our fathers originally placed it.

I remember Judge Douglas once said that he saw the evidences on the
statute books of Congress of a policy in the origin of government
to divide slavery and freedom by a geographical line; that he saw an
indisposition to maintain that policy, and therefore he set about studying
up a way to settle the institution on the right basis,--the basis which he
thought it ought to have been placed upon at first; and in that speech he
confesses that he seeks to place it, not upon the basis that the fathers
placed it upon, but upon one gotten up on "original principles." When he
asks me why we cannot get along with it in the attitude where our fathers
placed it, he had better clear up the evidences that he has himself
changed it from that basis, that he has himself been chiefly instrumental
in changing the policy of the fathers. Any one who will read his speech
of the 22d of last March will see that he there makes an open confession,
showing that he set about fixing the institution upon an altogether
different set of principles. I think I have fully answered him when he
asks me why we cannot let it alone upon the basis where our fathers
left it, by showing that he has himself changed the whole policy of th