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bluntly calls them ‘self-evident lies.’
And others insidiously argue that they apply to ‘superior races.’
These expressions, differing in form, are identical in object and effect — the supplanting the principles of free government, and restoring those of classification, caste, and legitimacy.
They would delight a convocation of crowned heads plotting against the people.
They are the vanguard, the miners and sappers of returning despotism.
We must repulse them, or they will subjugate us. This is a world of compensation; and he who would be no slave must consent to have no slave.
Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves, and, under a just God, cannot long retain it.
Douglas's quarrel with the
Buchanan administration had led many Republicans to hope that they might be able to utilize his name and his theory of popular sovereignty to aid them in their local campaigns.
Lincoln knew from his recent experience the peril of this delusive party strategy, and was constant and earnest in his warnings against adopting it. In a little speech after the
Chicago municipal election on March I, 1859, he said:
If we, the Republicans of this State, had made Judge Douglas our candidate for the Senate of the United States last year, and had elected him, there would to-day be no Republican party in this Union.
... Let the Republican party of Illinois dally with Judge Douglas, let them fall in behind him and make him their candidate, and they do not absorb him-he absorbs them.
They would come out at the end all Douglas men, all claimed by him as having indorsed every one of his doctrines upon the great subject with which the whole nation is engaged at this hour-that the question of negro slavery is simply a question of
