of personal difficulty. I tell him, no. He did not make a mistake, in one
of his early speeches, when he called me an "amiable" man, though perhaps
he did when he called me an "intelligent" man. It really hurts me very
much to suppose that I have wronged anybody on earth. I again tell him,
no! I very much prefer, when this canvass shall be over, however it may
result, that we at least part without any bitter recollections of
personal difficulties.

The Judge, in his concluding speech at Galesburgh, says that I was
pushing this matter to a personal difficulty, to avoid the responsibility
for the enormity of my principles. I say to the Judge and this audience,
now, that I will again state our principles, as well as I hastily can, in
all their enormity, and if the Judge hereafter chooses to confine himself
to a war upon these principles, he will probably not find me departing
from the same course.

We have in this nation this element of domestic slavery. It is a matter
of absolute certainty that it is a disturbing element. It is the opinion
of all the great men who have expressed an opinion upon it, that it is a
dangerous element. We keep up a controversy in regard to it. That
controversy necessarily springs from difference of opinion; and if we can
learn exactly--can reduce to the lowest elements--what that difference of
opinion is, we perhaps shall be better prepared for discussing the
different systems of policy that we would propose in regard to that
disturbing element. I suggest that the difference of opinion, reduced to
its lowest of terms, is no other than the difference between the men who
think slavery a wrong and those who do not think it wrong. The Republican
party think it wrong; we think it is a moral, a social, and a political
wrong. We think it as a wrong not confining itself merely to the persons
or the States where it exists, but that it is a wrong in its tendency, to