hough it is distasteful to me, I have sworn to support the
Constitution; and having so sworn, I cannot conceive that I do support
it if I withhold from that right any necessary legislation to make it
practical. And if that is true in regard to a Fugitive Slave law, is
the right to have fugitive slaves reclaimed any better fixed in the
Constitution than the right to hold slaves in the Territories? For this
decision is a just exposition of the Constitution, as Judge Douglas
thinks. Is the one right any better than the other? Is there any man who,
while a member of Congress, would give support to the one any more than
the other? If I wished to refuse to give legislative support to slave
property in the Territories, if a member of Congress, I could not do it,
holding the view that the Constitution establishes that right. If I did it
at all, it would be because I deny that this decision properly construes
the Constitution. But if I acknowledge, with Judge Douglas, that this
decision properly construes the Constitution, I cannot conceive that I
would be less than a perjured man if I should refuse in Congress to give
such protection to that property as in its nature it needed.

At the end of what I have said here I propose to give the Judge my fifth
interrogatory, which he may take and answer at his leisure. My fifth
interrogatory is this:

If the slaveholding citizens of a United States Territory should need
and demand Congressional legislation for the protection of their slave
property in such Territory, would you, as a member of Congress, vote for
or against such legislation?

[Judge DOUGLAS: Will you repeat that? I want to answer that question.]

If the slaveholding citizens of a United States Territory should need
and demand Congressional legislation for the protection of their slave
property in such Territory, would you, as a member of Congress, vote for
or against such legislation?

I am aware that in some of the speeches Judge Douglas has made, he has
spoken as if he did not know or think that the Supreme Court had decided
that a Territorial Legislature cannot exclude slavery. Precisely what the
Judge would say upon the subject--whether he would say definitely that he
does not understand they have so decided, or whether he would say he does
understand that the court have so decided,--I do not know; but I know
that in his speech at Springfield he spoke of it as a thing they had not
decided yet; and in his answer to