r name for the same thing,--"squatter
sovereignty." It was not exactly popular sovereignty, but squatter
sovereignty. What do those terms mean? What do those terms mean when used
now? And vast credit is taken by our friend the Judge in regard to his
support of it, when he declares the last years of his life have been,
and all the future years of his life shall be, devoted to this matter of
popular sovereignty. What is it? Why, it is the sovereignty of the people!
What was squatter sovereignty? I suppose, if it had any significance at
all, it was the right of the people to govern themselves, to be sovereign
in their own affairs while they were squatted down in a country not their
own, while they had squatted on a Territory that did not belong to them,
in the sense that a State belongs to the people who inhabit it, when
it belonged to the nation; such right to govern themselves was called
"squatter sovereignty."

Now, I wish you to mark: What has become of that squatter sovereignty?
what has become of it? Can you get anybody to tell you now that the people
of a Territory have any authority to govern themselves, in regard to this
mooted question of slavery, before they form a State constitution? No such
thing at all; although there is a general running fire, and although there
has been a hurrah made in every speech on that side, assuming that policy
had given the people of a Territory the right to govern themselves upon
this question, yet the point is dodged. To-day it has been decided--no
more than a year ago it was decided--by the Supreme Court of the United
States, and is insisted upon to-day that the people of a Territory have no
right to exclude slavery from a Territory; that if any one man chooses to
take slaves into a Territory, all the rest of the people have no right
to keep them out. This being so, and this decision being made one of the
points that the Judge approved, and one in the approval of which he says
he means to keep me down,--put me down I should not say, for I have never
been up,--he says he is in favor of it, and sticks to it, and expects to
win his battle on that decision, which says that there is no such thing
as squatter sovereignty, but that any one man may take slaves into a
Territory, and all the other men in the Territory may be opposed to it,
and yet by reason of the Constitution they cannot prohibit it. When that
is so, how much is left of this vast matter of squatter sovereignty, I
should lik