ad comparative peace upon the slavery question,
and that there has been no cause for alarm until it was excited by the
effort to spread it into new territory. Whenever it has been limited to
its present bounds, and there has been no effort to spread it, there has
been peace. All the trouble and convulsion has proceeded from efforts to
spread it over more territory. It was thus at the date of the Missouri
Compromise. It was so again with the annexation of Texas; so with the
territory acquired by the Mexican war; and it is so now. Whenever there
has been an effort to spread it, there has been agitation and resistance.
Now, I appeal to this audience (very few of whom are my political
friends), as national men, whether we have reason to expect that the
agitation in regard to this subject will cease while the causes that tend
to reproduce agitation are actively at work? Will not the same cause that
produced agitation in 1820, when the Missouri Compromise was formed, that
which produced the agitation upon the annexation of Texas, and at other
times, work out the same results always? Do you think that the nature of
man will be changed, that the same causes that produced agitation at one
time will not have the same effect at another?

This has been the result so far as my observation of the slavery question
and my reading in history extends. What right have we then to hope that
the trouble will cease,--that the agitation will come to an end,--until
it shall either be placed back where it originally stood, and where
the fathers originally placed it, or, on the other hand, until it shall
entirely master all opposition? This is the view I entertain, and this
is the reason why I entertained it, as Judge Douglas has read from my
Springfield speech.

Now, my friends, there is one other thing that I feel myself under some
sort of obligation to mention. Judge Douglas has here to-day--in a very
rambling way, I was about saying--spoken of the platforms for which he
seeks to hold me responsible. He says, "Why can't you come out and make
an open avowal of principles in all places alike?" and he reads from an
advertisement that he says was used to notify the people of a speech to be
made by Judge Trumbull at Waterloo. In commenting on it he desires to know
whether we cannot speak frankly and manfully, as he and his friends do.
How, I ask, do his friends speak out their own sentiments? A Convention
of his party in this State met on the 21st