tion exists, and that it is very difficult to get rid of it, in any
satisfactory way, I can understand and appreciate the saying. I will not
blame them for not doing what I should not know how to do myself. If
all earthly power were given me, I should not know what to do, as to the
existing institution. My first impulse would be to free all the slaves and
send them to Liberia,--to their own native land. But a moment's reflection
would convince me that whatever of high hope (as I think there is) there
may be in this in the long term, its sudden execution is impossible. If
they were all landed there in a day, they would all perish in the next ten
days; and there are not surplus shipping and surplus money enough in the
world to carry them there in many times ten days. What then? Free them
all and keep them among us as underlings? Is it quite certain that this
betters their condition? I think I would not hold one in slavery, at any
rate; yet the point is not clear enough to me to denounce people upon.
What next? Free them, and make them politically and socially our equals?
My own feelings will not admit of this; and if mine would, we well know
that those of the great mass of white people will not. Whether this
feeling accords with justice and sound judgment, is not the sole question,
if, indeed, it is any part of it. A universal feeling, whether well or ill
founded, cannot be safely disregarded. We cannot, then, make them equals.
It does seem to me that systems of gradual emancipation might be adopted;
but for their tardiness in this I will not undertake to judge our brethren
of the South.

"When they remind us of their constitutional rights, I acknowledge
them, not grudgingly, but fully and fairly; and I would give them any
legislation for the reclaiming of their fugitives, which should not, in
its stringency, be more likely to carry a free man into slavery than Our
ordinary criminal laws are to hang an innocent one.

"But all this, to my judgment, furnishes no more excuse for permitting
slavery to go into our own free territory than it would for reviving the
African slave-trade by law. The law which forbids the bringing of slaves
from Africa, and that which has so long forbid the taking of them to
Nebraska, can hardly be distinguished on any moral principle; and the
repeal of the former could find quite as plausible excuses as that of the
latter."

I have reason to know that Judge Douglas knows that I said this. I think