n, the Governor, urged it from
Vincennes, the capital. If that had succeeded, good-bye to liberty here.
But John Randolph of Virginia made a vigorous report against it; and
although they persevered so well as to get three favorable reports for it,
yet the United States Senate, with the aid of some slave States, finally
squelched if for good. [Applause.] And that is why this hall is to-day a
temple for free men instead of a negro livery-stable. [Great applause and
laughter.] Once let slavery get planted in a locality, by ever so weak or
doubtful a title, and in ever so small numbers, and it is like the Canada
thistle or Bermuda grass--you can't root it out. You yourself may detest
slavery; but your neighbor has five or six slaves, and he is an excellent
neighbor, or your son has married his daughter, and they beg you to help
save their property, and you vote against your interests and principle to
accommodate a neighbor, hoping that your vote will be on the losing side.
And others do the same; and in those ways slavery gets a sure foothold.
And when that is done the whole mighty Union--the force of the nation--is
committed to its support. And that very process is working in Kansas
to-day. And you must recollect that the slave property is worth a billion
of dollars; while free-State men must work for sentiment alone. Then there
are "blue lodges"--as they call them--everywhere doing their secret and
deadly work.

It is a very strange thing, and not solvable by any moral law that I know
of, that if a man loses his horse, the whole country will turn out to
help hang the thief; but if a man but a shade or two darker than I am is
himself stolen, the same crowd will hang one who aids in restoring him to
liberty. Such are the inconsistencies of slavery, where a horse is more
sacred than a man; and the essence of squatter or popular sovereignty--I
don't care how you call it--is that if one man chooses to make a slave of
another, no third man shall be allowed to object. And if you can do this
in free Kansas, and it is allowed to stand, the next thing you will see is
shiploads of negroes from Africa at the wharf at Charleston, for one thing
is as truly lawful as the other; and these are the bastard notions we have
got to stamp out, else they will stamp us out. [Sensation and applause.]

Two years ago, at Springfield, Judge Douglas avowed that Illinois came
into the Union as a slave State, and that slavery was weeded out by
the oper