e another, or that it can have any tendency to
make the people of Vermont raise sugar-cane, because they raise it in
Louisiana, or that it can compel the people of Illinois to cut pine logs
on the Grand Prairie, where they will not grow, because they cut pine
logs in Maine, where they do grow? The Judge says this is a new principle
started in regard to this question. Does the Judge claim that he is
working on the plan of the founders of government? I think he says in some
of his speeches indeed, I have one here now--that he saw evidence of a
policy to allow slavery to be south of a certain line, while north of
it it should be excluded, and he saw an indisposition on the part of the
country to stand upon that policy, and therefore he set about studying the
subject upon original principles, and upon original principles he got
up the Nebraska Bill! I am fighting it upon these "original principles,"
fighting it in the Jeffersonian, Washingtonian, and Madisonian fashion.

Now, my friends, I wish you to attend for a little while to one or two
other things in that Springfield speech. My main object was to show, so
far as my humble ability was capable of showing, to the people of this
country what I believed was the truth,--that there was a tendency, if not
a conspiracy, among those who have engineered this slavery question for
the last four or five years, to make slavery perpetual and universal in
this nation. Having made that speech principally for that object, after
arranging the evidences that I thought tended to prove my proposition, I
concluded with this bit of comment:

"We cannot absolutely know that these exact adaptations are the result of
preconcert; but when we see a lot of framed timbers, different portions of
which we know have been gotten out at different times and places, and by
different workmen--Stephen, Franklin, Roger, and James, for instance,--and
when we see these timbers joined together, and see they exactly make the
frame of a house or a mill, all the tenons and mortises exactly fitting,
and all the lengths and proportions of the different pieces exactly
adapted to their respective places, and not a piece too many or too
few,--not omitting even the scaffolding,--or if a single piece be lacking,
we see the place in the frame exactly fitted and prepared yet to bring
such piece in,--in such a case we feel it impossible not to believe that
Stephen and Franklin and Roger and James all understood one another fr