only lacking three days of a month, before I made the speech at
Charleston, which the Judge quotes from, he had himself heard me say
substantially the same thing It was in our first meeting, at Ottawa--and
I will say a word about where it was, and the atmosphere it was in, after
a while--but at our first meeting, at Ottawa, I read an extract from an
old speech of mine, made nearly four years ago, not merely to show my
sentiments, but to show that my sentiments were long entertained and
openly expressed; in which extract I expressly declared that my own
feelings would not admit a social and political equality between the
white and black races, and that even if my own feelings would admit of
it, I still knew that the public sentiment of the country would not, and
that such a thing was an utter impossibility, or substantially that. That
extract from my old speech the reporters by some sort of accident passed
over, and it was not reported. I lay no blame upon anybody. I suppose
they thought that I would hand it over to them, and dropped reporting
while I was giving it, but afterward went away without getting it from
me. At the end of that quotation from my old speech, which I read at
Ottawa, I made the comments which were reported at that time, and which I
will now read, and ask you to notice how very nearly they are the same as
Judge Douglas says were delivered by me down in Egypt. After reading, I
added these words:

"Now, gentlemen, I don't want to read at any great length; but this is
the true complexion of all I have ever said in regard to the institution
of slavery or the black race, and this is the whole of it: anything that
argues me into his idea of perfect social and political equality with the
negro, is but a specious and fantastical arrangement of words by which a
man can prove a horse-chestnut to be a chestnut horse. I will say here,
while upon this subject, that I have no purpose, directly or indirectly,
to interfere with the institution in the States where it exists. I