LINCOLN of liberty; and then, and not till then, could they penetrate slavery in this country! To my thinkinj?. Judge Douglas is, by his example and vast influence, doing that very thing in this community when he says that the negro has nothing in the Declaration of Independence. Henry Clay plainly understood the contrary. Judge Douglas is going back to the era of our Revolution, and to the extent of his ability muzzling the cannon which thunders its annual joyous return. When he invites any people, willing to have slavery, to establish it, he is blowing out the moral lights around us. When he says he ** cares not whether slavery is voted down or voted up ' ' — that it is a sacred right of self-government — ^he is, in my judgment, pen- etrating the human soul and eradicating the light of reason and the love of liberty in this American people. And now I will only say that when, by all these means and appliances, Judge Douglas shall succeed in bringing public senti- ment to an exact accordance with his own views — ^when these vast assemblages shall echo back all these sentiments — ^when they shall come to repeat his views and to avow his principles, and to assent to all that on these mighty ques- tions, — ^then it needs only the formality of the second Dred Scott decision, which he indorses in advance, to make slavery alike lawful in all the States — old as well as new, North as well as South. 237
