fact, and without truth, is enough to bring down and destroy the purest and best of living men.

"Fellow-citizens, my time is fast expiring; I must pass on. Mr. Lincoln wants to know why I voted against Mr. Chase's amendment to the Nebraska bill. I will tell him. In the first place, the bill already conferred all the power which Congress had, by giving the people the whole power over the subject. Chase offered a proviso that they might abolish slavery, which, by implication, would convey the idea that they could prohibit slavery by not introducing that institution.

"General Cass asked him to modify his amendment, so as to provide that the people might either prohibit or introduce slavery, and thus make it fair and equal.

"Chase refused to so modify his proviso, and then General Cass and all the rest of us voted it down. Those facts appear on the journals and debates of Congress, where Mr. Lincoln found the charge, and if he had told the whole truth, there would have been no necessity for me to occupy your time in explaining the

matter.

"Mr. Lincoln wants to know why the word 'State' as well as 'Territory' was put in the Nebraska bill.

"I will tell him. It was put there to meet just such false arguments as he has been adducing.

"That, first, not only the people of the Territories should do as they pleased, but that when they came to be admitted as States, they should come into the Union with or without slavery, as the people determined. I meant to knock in the head the abolition doctrine of Mr. Lincoln's that there shall be no more slave States, even if the people want them. And it does not

do for him to say, or for any other Black Republican to say, that there is nobody in favor of the doctrine of no more slave States, and that nobody wants to interfere with the right of the people to do as they please.

"What was the origin of the Missouri difficulty and the Missouri Compromise? The people of Missouri formed a Constitution as a slave State, and asked admission into the Union, but the Free Soil party of the North, being in a majority, refused to admit her because she had slavery as one of her institutions.

"Hence this first slavery agitation arose upon a State and not upon a Territory, and yet Mr. Lincoln does not know why the word State was placed in the KansasNebraska bill. The whole abolition agitation arose on that doctrine of prohibiting a State from coming in with slavery or not, as it pleased, and that same doctrine is here in this Republican platform of 1854; it has never been repealed; and every Black Republican stands pledged by that platform never to vote for any man who is not in favor of it. Yet Mr. Lincoln does not know that there is a man in the world who is in favor of preventing a State from coming in as it pleases, notwithstanding the Springfield platform says that they, the Republican party, will not allow a State to come in under such circumstances. He is an ignorant man.

"Now you see that upon these very points I am as far from bringing Mr. Lincoln up to the line as I ever was before. He does not want to avow his principles, I do want to avow mine, as clear as sunshine in midday. Democracy is founded upon the eternal principle of right. The plainer these principles are avowed before the people, the stronger will be the support

which they will receive. I only wish I had the power to make them so clear that they would shine in the heavens for every man, woman, and child to read.

"The first of those principles that I would proclaim would be in opposition to Mr. Lincoln's doctrine of uniformity between the different States, and I would declare instead the sovereign right of each State to decide the slavery question as well as all other domestic questions for themselves, without interference from any other State or power whatsoever.

"When that principle is recognized you will have peace and harmony and fraternal feeling between all the States of this Union; until you do recognize that doctrine there will be sectional warfare agitating and distracting the country. What does Mr. Lincoln propose? He says that the Union cannot exist divided into free and slave States. If it cannot endure thus divided, then he must strive to make them all free or all slave, which will inevitably bring about the dissolution of the Union.

"Gentlemen, I am told that my time is out, and I am obliged to stop."

LINCOLN'S GREAT COOPER INSTITUTE SPEECH.

Delivered at Cooper Institute, New York City, February 27, 1860. This speech, more than any other one, is supposed to have secured Lincoln the nomination for the Presidency.

"Mr. President and Fellow-Citizens of New York: The facts with which I shall deal this evening are mainly old and familiar; nor is there anything new in