people liars. Why, sir, there is not a word in
Trumbull's speech that depends on Trumbull's veracity at all. He has only
arrayed the evidence and told you what follows as a matter of reasoning.
There is not a statement in the whole speech that depends on Trumbull's
word. If you have ever studied geometry, you remember that by a course of
reasoning Euclid proves that all the angles in a triangle are equal to
two right angles. Euclid has shown you how to work it out. Now, if you
undertake to disprove that proposition, and to show that it is erroneous,
would you prove it to be false by calling Euclid a liar? They tell me that
my time is out, and therefore I close.

FIFTH JOINT DEBATE, AT GALESBURGH, OCTOBER 7, 1858

Mr. LINCOLN'S REPLY.

MY FELLOW-CITIZENS: A very large portion of the speech which Judge Douglas
has addressed to you has previously been delivered and put in print. I
do not mean that for a hit upon the Judge at all.---If I had not been
interrupted, I was going to say that such an answer as I was able to make
to a very large portion of it had already been more than once made and
published. There has been an opportunity afforded to the public to see
our respective views upon the topics discussed in a large portion of the
speech which he has just delivered. I make these remarks for the purpose
of excusing myself for not passing over the entire ground that the Judge
has traversed. I however desire to take up some of the points that he
has attended to, and ask your attention to them, and I shall follow him
backwards upon some notes which I have taken, reversing the order, by
beginning where he concluded.

The Judge has alluded to the Declaration of Independence, and insisted
that negroes are not included in that Declaration; and that it is a
slander upon the framers of that instrument to suppose that negroes
were meant therein; and he asks you: Is it possible to believe that Mr.
Jefferson, who penned the immortal paper, could have supposed himself
applying the language of that instrument to the negro race, and yet held
a portion of that race in slavery? Would he not at once have freed them?
I only have to remark upon this part of the Judge's speech (and that, too,
very briefly, for I shall not detain myself, or you, upon that point for
any great length of time), that I believe the entire records of the world,
from the date of the Declaration of Independence up to within three years
ago, may be searched i