party, I hope you will permit me to read a part of a printed speech that
I made then at Peoria, which will show altogether a different view of the
position I took in that contest of 1854.

[Voice: "Put on your specs."]

Mr. LINCOLN: Yes, sir, I am obliged to do so; I am no longer a young man.

"This is the repeal of the Missouri Compromise. The foregoing history may
not be precisely accurate in every particular, but I am sure it is
sufficiently so for all the uses I shall attempt to make of it, and in it
we have before us the chief materials enabling us to correctly judge
whether the repeal of the Missouri Compromise is right or wrong.

"I think, and shall try to show, that it is wrong--wrong in its direct
effect, letting slavery into Kansas and Nebraska, and wrong in its
prospective principle, allowing it to spread to every other part of the
wide world where men can be found inclined to take it.

"This declared indifference, but, as I must think, covert real zeal for
the spread of slavery, I cannot but hate. I hate it because of the
monstrous injustice of slavery itself. I hate it because it deprives our
republican example of its just influence in the world,--enables the
enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as
hypocrites; causes the real friends of freedom to doubt our sincerity,
and especially because it forces so many really good men amongst
ourselves into an open war with the very fundamental principles of civil
liberty, criticizing the Declaration of Independence, and insisting that
there is no right principle of action but self-interest.