hough I don't know that it
was reported in any of his speeches there, but he frequently made it). I
believe he repeated it at Columbus, and I should not wonder if he repeated
it here. It is, then, a deliberate way of expressing himself upon that
subject. It is a matter of mature deliberation with him thus to express
himself upon that point of his case. It therefore requires deliberate
attention.

The first inference seems to be that if you do not enslave the negro,
you are wronging the white man in some way or other, and that whoever is
opposed to the negro being enslaved, is, in some way or other, against
the white man. Is not that a falsehood? If there was a necessary conflict
between the white man and the negro, I should be for the white man as much
as Judge Douglas; but I say there is no such necessary conflict. I say
that there is room enough for us all to be free, and that it not only does
not wrong the white man that the negro should be free, but it positively
wrongs the mass of the white men that the negro should be enslaved; that
the mass of white men are really injured by the effects of slave labor in
the vicinity of the fields of their own labor.

But I do not desire to dwell upon this branch of the question more than to
say that this assumption of his is false, and I do hope that that fallacy
will not long prevail in the minds of intelligent white men. At all
events, you ought to thank Judge Douglas for it; it is for your benefit it
is made.

The other branch of it is, that in the struggle between the negro and
the crocodile; he is for the negro. Well, I don't know that there is any
struggle between the negro and the crocodile, either. I suppose that if a
crocodile (or, as we old Ohio River boatmen used to call them, alligators)
should come across a white man, he would kill him if he could; and so he
would a negro. But what, at last, is this proposition? I believe it is a
sort of proposition in proportion, which may be stated thus: "As the negro
is to the white man, so is the crocodile to the negro; and as the negro
may rightfully treat the crocodile as a beast or reptile, so the white man
may rightfully treat the negro as a beast or a reptile." That is really
the "knip" of all that argument of his.

Now, my brother Kentuckians, who believe in this, you ought to thank
Judge Douglas for having put that in a much more taking way than any of
yourselves have done.

Again, Douglas's great principle, "popular