MY FRIENDS:--Since Judge Douglas has said to you in his conclusion that
he had not time in an hour and a half to answer all I had said in an
hour, it follows of course that I will not be able to answer in half an
hour all that he said in an hour and a half.

I wish to return to Judge Douglas my profound thanks for his public
annunciation here to-day, to be put on record, that his system of policy
in regard to the institution of slavery contemplates that it shall last
forever. We are getting a little nearer the true issue of this
controversy, and I am profoundly grateful for this one sentence. Judge
Douglas asks you, Why cannot the institution of slavery, or rather, why
cannot the nation, part slave and part free, continue as our fathers made
it, forever? In the first place, I insist that our fathers did not make
this nation half slave and half free, or part slave and part free. I
insist that they found the institution of slavery existing here. They did
not make it so but they left it so because they knew of no way to get rid
of it at that time. When Judge Douglas undertakes to say that, as a
matter of choice, the fathers of the government made this nation part
slave and part free, he assumes what is historically a falsehood. More
than that: when the fathers of the government cut off the source of
slavery by the abolition of the slave-trade, and adopted a system of
restricting it from the new Territories where it had not existed, I
maintain that they placed it where they understood, and all sensible men
understood, it was in the course of ultimate extinction; and when Judge
Douglas asks me why it cannot continue as our fathers made it, I ask him
why he and his friends could not let it remain as our fathers made it?

It is precisely all I ask of him in relation to the institution of
slavery, that it shall be placed upon the basis that our fathers placed
it upon. Mr. Brooks, of South Carolina, once said, and truly said, that