s made he had been with those friends, and had not kept his
promise in regard to the investigation and the report upon it. I am not
a very daring man, but I dared that much, Judge, and I am not much scared
about it yet. When the Judge says he would n't have believed of Abraham
Lincoln that he would have made such an attempt as that he reminds me of
the fact that he entered upon this canvass with the purpose to treat
me courteously; that touched me somewhat. It sets me to thinking. I was
aware, when it was first agreed that Judge Douglas and I were to have
these seven joint discussions, that they were the successive acts of a
drama, perhaps I should say, to be enacted, not merely in the face of
audiences like this, but in the face of the nation, and to some extent,
by my relation to him, and not from anything in myself, in the face of the
world; and I am anxious that they should be conducted with dignity and in
the good temper which would be befitting the vast audiences before which
it was conducted. But when Judge Douglas got home from Washington and made
his first speech in Chicago, the evening afterward I made some sort of
a reply to it. His second speech was made at Bloomington, in which he
commented upon my speech at Chicago and said that I had used language
ingeniously contrived to conceal my intentions, or words to that effect.
Now, I understand that this is an imputation upon my veracity and my
candor. I do not know what the Judge understood by it, but in our first
discussion, at Ottawa, he led off by charging a bargain, somewhat corrupt
in its character, upon Trumbull and myself,--that we had entered into a
bargain, one of the terms of which was that Trumbull was to Abolitionize
the old Democratic party, and I (Lincoln) was to Abolitionize the old Whig
party; I pretending to be as good an old-line Whig as ever. Judge Douglas
may not understand that he implicated my truthfulness and my honor when he
said I was doing one thing and pretending another; and I misunderstood him
if he thought he was treating me in a dignified way, as a man of honor and
truth, as he now claims he was disposed to treat me. Even after that time,
at Galesburgh, when he brings forward an extract from a speech made at
Chicago and an extract from a speech made at Charleston, to prove that I
was trying to play a double part, that I was trying to cheat the public,
and get votes upon one set of principles at one place, and upon another
set of princ