to him that Jefferson did not so believe. I
have said that I have often heard him approve of Jackson's course in
disregarding the decision of the Supreme Court, pronouncing a national
bank unconstitutional. He says: I did not hear him say so; he denies the
accuracy of my recollection. I say he ought to know better than I, but I
will make no question about this thing, though it still seems to me I
heard him say it twenty times. I will tell him, though, that he now
claims to stand on the Cincinnati platform which affirms that Congress
_cannot_ charter a national bank, in the teeth of that old standing
decision that Congress _can_ charter a bank. And I remind him of another
piece of history on the question of respect for judicial decisions, and
it is a piece of Illinois history belonging to a time when the large
party to which Judge Douglas belonged were displeased with a decision of
the Supreme Court of Illinois, because they had decided that a Governor
could not remove a Secretary of State. I know that Judge Douglas will
not deny that he was then in favor of oversloughing that decision by the
mode of adding five new judges, so as to vote down the four old ones.
Not only so, but it ended in the judge's sitting down on that very
bench, as one of the five new judges so as to break down the four old
ones." In this strain Mr. Lincoln occupied most of his time. But the
debate was a very equal thing, and the contest did not prove a 'walk
over' either way.

At the meeting in Ottawa Mr. Lincoln propounded certain questions to
which Judge Douglas promptly answered. Judge Douglas spoke in something
of the following strain: "He desires to know if the people of Kansas
shall form a constitution by means entirely proper and unobjectionable,
and ask admission into the Union as a State before they have the
requisite population for a member of Congress, whether I will vote for
that admission? Well, now, I regret exceedingly that he did not answer
that interrogatory himself before he put it to me, in order that we
might understand and not be left to infer on which side he is. Mr.
Trumbull during the last session of Congress voted from the beginning to
the end against the admission of Oregon, although a free State, because
she had not the requisite population. As Mr. Trumbull is in the field
fighting for Mr. Lincoln, I would like to have Mr. Lincoln answer his
own question and tell me whether he is fighting Trumbull on that issue
or not. Bu