support his constitutional rights, not withhold that legislation. If you
withhold that necessary legislation for the support of the Constitution
and constitutional rights, do you not commit perjury? I ask every
sensible man if that is not so? That is undoubtedly just so, say what you
please. Now, that is precisely what Judge Douglas says, that this is a
constitutional right. Does the Judge mean to say that the Territorial
Legislature in legislating may, by withholding necessary laws, or by
passing unfriendly laws, nullify that constitutional right? Does he mean
to say that? Does he mean to ignore the proposition so long and well
established in law, that what you cannot do directly, you cannot do
indirectly? Does he mean that? The truth about the matter is this: Judge
Douglas has sung paeans to his "Popular Sovereignty" doctrine until his
Supreme Court, co-operating with him, has squatted his Squatter
Sovereignty out. But he will keep up this species of humbuggery about
Squatter Sovereignty. He has at last invented this sort of do-nothing
sovereignty,--that the people may exclude slavery by a sort of
"sovereignty" that is exercised by doing nothing at all. Is not that
running his Popular Sovereignty down awfully? Has it not got down as thin
as the homeopathic soup that was made by boiling the shadow of a pigeon
that had starved to death? But at last, when it is brought to the test of
close reasoning, there is not even that thin decoction of it left. It is
a presumption impossible in the domain of thought. It is precisely no
other than the putting of that most unphilosophical proposition, that two
bodies can occupy the same space at the same time. The Dred Scott
decision covers the whole ground, and while it occupies it, there is no
room even for the shadow of a starved pigeon to occupy the same ground.

Judge Douglas, in reply to what I have said about having upon a previous
occasion made the speech at Ottawa as the one he took an extract from at
Charleston, says it only shows that I practiced the deception twice. Now,