ould not, and that
such a thing was an utter impossibility, or substantially that. That
extract from my old speech the reporters by some sort of accident passed
over, and it was not reported. I lay no blame upon anybody. I suppose they
thought that I would hand it over to them, and dropped reporting while I
was giving it, but afterward went away without getting it from me. At the
end of that quotation from my old speech, which I read at Ottawa, I made
the comments which were reported at that time, and which I will now read,
and ask you to notice how very nearly they are the same as Judge Douglas
says were delivered by me down in Egypt. After reading, I added these
words:

"Now, gentlemen, I don't want to read at any great length; but this is the
true complexion of all I have ever said in regard to the institution of
slavery or the black race, and this is the whole of it: anything that
argues me into his idea of perfect social and political equality with the
negro, is but a specious and fantastical arrangement of words by which a
man can prove a horse-chestnut to be a chestnut horse. I will say here,
while upon this subject, that I have no purpose, directly or indirectly,
to interfere with the institution in the States where it exists. I believe
I have no right to do so. I have no inclination to do so. I have no
purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and
black races. There is a physical difference between the two which, in
my judgment, will probably forever forbid their living together on the
footing of perfect equality; and inasmuch as it becomes a necessity that
there must be a difference, I, as well as Judge Douglas, am in favor of
the race to which I belong having the superior position. I have never said
anything to the contrary, but I hold that, notwithstanding all this, there
is no reason in the world why the negro is not entitled to all the
rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence,--the right of life,
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I hold that he is as much entitled
to these as the white man. I agree with Judge Douglas that he is not
my equal in many respects, certainly not in color, perhaps not in
intellectual and moral endowments; but in the right to eat the bread,
without the leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, he is my
equal and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every other man."

I have chiefly introduced this for the purpose of meeting