es with any other man's rights;
that each community as a State has a right to do exactly as it pleases
with all the concerns within that State that interfere with the right of
no other State; and that the General Government, upon principle, has no
right to interfere with anything other than that general class of things
that does concern the whole. I have said that at all times. I have said,
as illustrations, that I do not believe in the right of Illinois to
interfere with the cranberry laws of Indiana, the oyster laws of Virginia,
or the liquor laws of Maine. I have said these things over and over again,
and I repeat them here as my sentiments.

How is it, then, that Judge Douglas infers, because I hope to see slavery
put where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the
course of ultimate extinction, that I am in favor of Illinois going over
and interfering with the cranberry laws of Indiana? What can authorize him
to draw any such inference?

I suppose there might be one thing that at least enabled him to draw
such an inference that would not be true with me or many others: that is,
because he looks upon all this matter of slavery as an exceedingly little
thing,--this matter of keeping one sixth of the population of the whole
nation in a state of oppression and tyranny unequaled in the world. He
looks upon it as being an exceedingly little thing,--only equal to the
question of the cranberry laws of Indiana; as something having no moral
question in it; as something on a par with the question of whether a man
shall pasture his land with cattle, or plant it with tobacco; so little
and so small a thing that he concludes, if I could desire that anything
should be done to bring about the ultimate extinction of that little
thing, I must be in favor of bringing about an amalgamation of all
the other little things in the Union. Now, it so happens--and there, I
presume, is the foundation of this mistake--that the Judge thinks thus;
and it so happens that there is a vast portion of the American people that
do not look upon that matter as being this very little thing. They look
upon it as a vast moral evil; they can prove it as such by the writings of
those who gave us the blessings of liberty which we enjoy, and that they
so looked upon it, and not as an evil merely confining itself to the
States where it is situated; and while we agree that, by the Constitution
we assented to, in the States where it exists, we ha