to be labeled upon the cars in which he travels; put upon the hacks he
rides in; to be flaunted upon the arches he passes under, and the banners
which wave over him. It is to be dished up in as many varieties as a
French cook can produce soups from potatoes. Now, as this is so great a
staple of the plan of the campaign, it is worth while to examine it
carefully; and if we examine only a very little, and do not allow
ourselves to be misled, we shall be able to see that the whole thing is
the most arrant Quixotism that was ever enacted before a community. What
is the matter of popular sovereignty? The first thing, in order to
understand it, is to get a good definition of what it is, and after that
to see how it is applied.

I suppose almost every one knows that, in this controversy, whatever has
been said has had reference to the question of negro slavery. We have not
been in a controversy about the right of the people to govern themselves
in the ordinary matters of domestic concern in the States and
Territories. Mr. Buchanan, in one of his late messages (I think when he
sent up the Lecompton Constitution) urged that the main point to which
the public attention had been directed was not in regard to the great
variety of small domestic matters, but was directed to the question of
negro slavery; and he asserts that if the people had had a fair chance to
vote on that question there was no reasonable ground of objection in
regard to minor questions. Now, while I think that the people had not had
given, or offered, them a fair chance upon that slavery question, still,
if there had been a fair submission to a vote upon that main question,
the President's proposition would have been true to the utmost. Hence,
when hereafter I speak of popular sovereignty, I wish to be understood as
applying what I say to the question of slavery only, not to other minor
domestic matters of a Territory or a State.