th them; but as you have made up your
organization upon principle, stand by it; for, as surely as God reigns
over you, and has inspired your mind, and given you a sense of propriety,
and continues to give you hope, so surely will you still cling to these
ideas, and you will at last come back again after your wanderings, merely
to do your work over again.

We were often,--more than once, at least,--in the course of Judge
Douglas's speech last night, reminded that this government was made for
white men; that he believed it was made for white men. Well, that is
putting it into a shape in which no one wants to deny it; but the Judge
then goes into his passion for drawing inferences that are not warranted.
I protest, now and forever, against that counterfeit logic which presumes
that because I did not want a negro woman for a slave, I do necessarily
want her for a wife. My understanding is that I need not have her for
either, but, as God made us separate, we can leave one another alone, and
do one another much good thereby. There are white men enough to marry all
the white women, and enough black men to marry all the black women; and in
God's name let them be so married. The Judge regales us with the terrible
enormities that take place by the mixture of races; that the inferior race
bears the superior down. Why, Judge, if we do not let them get together in
the Territories, they won't mix there.

[A voice: "Three cheers for Lincoln".--The cheers were given with a hearty
good-will.]

I should say at least that that is a self-evident truth.

Now, it happens that we meet together once every year, sometimes about
the 4th of July, for some reason or other. These 4th of July gatherings
I suppose have their uses. If you will indulge me, I will state what I
suppose to be some of them.

We are now a mighty nation; we are thirty or about thirty millions of
people, and we own and inhabit about one fifteenth part of the dry land
of the whole earth. We run our memory back over the pages of history for
about eighty-two years, and we discover that we were then a very small
people in point of numbers, vastly inferior to what we are now, with a
vastly less extent of country, with vastly less of everything we deem
desirable among men; we look upon the change as exceedingly advantageous
to us and to our posterity, and we fix upon something that happened
away back, as in some way or other being connected with this rise of
prosperity. We fin