being decided by the court, he is, and you are, bound to take it in your political action as law,-not that he judges at all of its merits, but because a decision of the court is to him a "Thus saith the Lord." He places it on that ground alone, and you will bear in mind that thus committing himself unreservedly to this decision commits him to the next one just as firmly as to this. He did not commit himself on account of the merit or demerit of the decision, but it is a "Thus saith the Lord." The next decision, as much as this, will be a "Thus saith the Lord." There is nothing that can divert or turn him away from this decision. It is nothing that I point out to him that his great prototype, General Jackson, did not believe in the binding force of decisions. It is nothing to him that Jefferson did not so believe. I have said that I have often heard him approve of Jackson's course in disregarding the decision of the Supreme Court pronouncing a national bank constitutional. He says I did not hear him say so. He denies the accuracy of my recollection. I say he ought to know better than I; but I will make no question about this thing, though it still seems to me that I heard him say it twenty times. I will tell him, though, that he now claims to stand on the Cincinnati platform, which affirms that Congress can not charter a national bank, in the teeth of that old standing decision that Congress can charter a bank. And I remind him of another piece of history on the question of respect for judicial decisions, and it is a piece of Illinois history, belonging to a time when a large party to which Judge Douglas belonged were displeased with a decision of the Supreme Court of Illinois because they had decided that a Governor could not remove a Secretary of State. You will find the whole story in Ford's History of Illinois, and I know that Judge Douglas will not deny that he was then in favor of overslaughing that decision by the mode of adding five new judges, so as to vote down the four old ones. Not only so, but it ended in the Judge's sitting down on the very bench as one of the five new Judges to break down the four old ones. It was

in this way precisely that he got his title of judge. Now, when the Judge tells me that men appointed conditionally to sit as members of a court will have to be catechised beforehand upon some subject, I say, "You know, Judge; you have tried it." When he says a court of this kind will lose the confidence of all men, will be prostituted and disgraced by such a proceeding, I say, "You know best, Judge; you have been through the mill."

But I can not shake Judge Douglas's teeth loose from the Dred Scott decision. Like some obstinate animal (I mean no disrespect) that will hang on when he has once got his teeth fixed, you may cut off a leg or you may tear away an arm, still he will not relax his hold. And so I may point out to the Judge, and say that he is bespattered all over, from the beginning of his political life to the present time, with attacks upon judicial decisions; I may cut off limb after limb of his public record, and strive to wrench from him a single dictum of the court,-yet I can not divert him from it. He hangs to the last to the Dred Scott decision. These things show there is a purpose strong as death and eternity for which he adheres to this decision, and for which he will adhere to all other decisions of the same court. [A voice: "Give us something besides Dred Scott."] Yes; no doubt you want to hear something that don't hurt.

Now, having spoken of the Dred Scott decision, one more word and I am done. Henry Clay, my beau-ideal of a statesman, the man for whom I fought all my humble life,Henry Clay once said of a class of men who would repress all tendencies to liberty and ultimate emancipation, that they must, if they would do this, go back to the era of our independence and muzzle the cannon which thunders its annual joyous return; they must blow out the moral lights around us; they must penetrate the human soul and eradicate there the love of liberty; and then, and not till then, could they perpetuate slavery in this country! To my thinking, Judge Douglas is, by his example and vast influence, doing that very thing in this community when he says that

the negro has nothing in the Declaration of Independence. Henry Clay plainly understood the contrary. Judge Douglas is going back to the era of our Revolution, and to the extent of his ability muzzling the cannon which thunders its annual joyous return. When he invites any people, willing to have slavery, to establish it, he is blowing out the moral lights around us. When he says he "cares not whether slavery is voted down or voted up,"-that it is a sacred right of self-government, he is, in my judgment, penetrating the human soul, and eradicating the light of reason and the love of liberty in this American people. And now I will only say that when, by all these means and appliances, Judge Douglas shall succeed in bringing public sentiment to an exact accordance with his own views,-when these vast assemblages shall echo back all these sentiments, -when they shall come to repeat his views and to avow his principles, and to say all that he says on these mighty questions, then it needs only the formality of the second Dred Scott decision, which he indorses in advance, to make slavery alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new, North as well as South.

22. WILLIAM H. SEWARD, OF NEW YORK. THE IR

REPRESSIBLE CONFLICT

(Delivered at Rochester, N. Y., October 21, 1858.)

FOUR months after Lincoln first put forth his "house divided against itself" doctrine, the same thought was expressed independently by Senator Seward at Rochester, N. Y., in his speech on the Irrepressible Conflict. The impression made by Lincoln's speech was considerable, but it was as nothing compared to the furor aroused both North and South by Seward's declaration; for Seward was almost universally looked upon as the next candidate of the Republican party for the presidency.

Of Seward's speech, Mr. Rhodes says: "Few speeches from the stump have attracted so great attention or exerted so great an influence;" and he rightly describes it as "a philippic against the Democratic party and its devotion to slavery." (History of the United States from 1850, II, p. 344.) Its author was unquestionably one of the foremost statesmen of his time; but his utterances here fall short alike of the trenchant directness of Lincoln's words, and Lincoln's downright honesty with the people, of whom he There is a strain of fallacious exaggeration running through Seward's speech which he, as an upper-class statesman appealing to the masses, may have deemed nec

was one.

WILLIAM HENRY SEWARD. Born in New York State, 1801; graduated from Union College, 1820; began the practice of law, at Auburn, N. Y., which was thenceforth his home, 1823; served for four years as a Whig in the State Senate; Governor of New York, 1838-42; United States Senator, 1849-61; member of the Republican party since 1856; Secretary of State, 1861-69, siding with President Johnson in the quarrel of the latter with Congress; died, 1872.

essary, but which Lincoln's shrewder sense and keener logic avoided. To particularize: slavery, as we can now see, was not the cause of the troubles of South America, nor of the despotism of Russia; a free labor system does not alone secure "universal contentment;" free labor and slave labor are not entirely incompatible; and the attitude of the fathers of the Constitution on slavery, and the provisions of that document itself, were not altogether what Seward asserted them to be. Nevertheless, Seward's speech was unquestionably a great one and it did much to strengthen the Republican party.

T

[WILLIAM H. SEWARD, at Rochester, N. Y., October 21, 1858.]

HE UNMISTAKABLE outbreaks of zeal which occur all around me, show that you are earnest men-and such

a man am I. Let us therefore, at least for a time, pass by all secondary and collateral questions, whether of a personal or of a general nature, and consider the main subject of the present canvass. The Democratic party-or, to speak more accurately, the party which wears that attractive name is in possession of the Federal government. The Republicans propose to dislodge that party, and dismiss it from its high trust.

The main subject, then, is, whether the Democratic party deserves to retain the confidence of the American people. In attempting to prove it unworthy, I think that I am not actuated by prejudices against that party, or by prepossessions in favor of its adversary; for I have learned, by some experience, that virtue and patriotism, vice and selfishness, are found in all parties, and that they differ less in their motives than in the policies they pursue.

Our country is a theater which exhibits, in full operation, two radically different political systems; the one resting on the basis of servile or slave labor, the other on the basis of voluntary labor of free men.