em; nor does Judge Douglas now grapple with those
principles. We have a Republican State Platform, laid down in Springfield
in June last stating our position all the way through the questions before
the country. We are now far advanced in this canvass. Judge Douglas and
I have made perhaps forty speeches apiece, and we have now for the fifth
time met face to face in debate, and up to this day I have not found
either Judge Douglas or any friend of his taking hold of the Republican
platform, or laying his finger upon anything in it that is wrong. I ask
you all to recollect that. Judge Douglas turns away from the platform
of principles to the fact that he can find people somewhere who will not
allow us to announce those principles. If he had great confidence that our
principles were wrong, he would take hold of them and demonstrate them to
be wrong. But he does not do so. The only evidence he has of their being
wrong is in the fact that there are people who won't allow us to preach
them. I ask again, is that the way to test the soundness of a doctrine?

I ask his attention also to the fact that by the rule of nationality he is
himself fast becoming sectional. I ask his attention to the fact that his
speeches would not go as current now south of the Ohio River as they have
formerly gone there I ask his attention to the fact that he felicitates
himself to-day that all the Democrats of the free States are agreeing with
him, while he omits to tell us that the Democrats of any slave State agree
with him. If he has not thought of this, I commend to his consideration
the evidence in his own declaration, on this day, of his becoming
sectional too. I see it rapidly approaching. Whatever may be the result
of this ephemeral contest between Judge Douglas and myself, I see the
day rapidly approaching when his pill of sectionalism, which he has been
thrusting down the throats of Republicans for years past, will be crowded
down his own throat.

Now, in regard to what Judge Douglas said (in the beginning of his speech)
about the Compromise of 1850 containing the principles of the Nebraska
Bill, although I have often presented my views upon that subject, yet as
I have not done so in this canvass, I will, if you please, detain you a
little with them. I have always maintained, so far as I was able, that
there was nothing of the principle of the Nebraska Bill in the Compromise
of 1850 at all,--nothing whatever. Where can you find the principle