Then there are "blue lodges"--as they call
them--everywhere doing their secret and deadly work.
It is a very strange thing, and not solvable by any moral law that I know
of, that if a man loses his horse, the whole country will turn out to
help hang the thief; but if a man but a shade or two darker than I am is
himself stolen, the same crowd will hang one who aids in restoring him to
liberty. Such are the inconsistencies of slavery, where a horse is more
sacred than a man; and the essence of squatter or popular sovereignty--I
don't care how you call it--is that if one man chooses to make a slave of
another, no third man shall be allowed to object. And if you can do this
in free Kansas, and it is allowed to stand, the next thing you will see
is shiploads of negroes from Africa at the wharf at Charleston, for one
thing is as truly lawful as the other; and these are the bastard notions
we have got to stamp out, else they will stamp us out. [Sensation and
applause.]
Two years ago, at Springfield, Judge Douglas avowed that Illinois came
into the Union as a slave State, and that slavery was weeded out by the
operation of his great, patent, everlasting principle of "popular
sovereignty.
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