Book Description

Excerpt from The Lincoln-Douglas Debates, 1858: Galesburg, Illinois, Oct 7, 1858; Excerpts From Newspapers and Other Sources, From the Files of the Lincoln Financial Foundation Collection As to the alleged inconsistency in his speeches, Lincoln denied that there was any ground for such a charge. But the Judge will have it, he said, that if we do not confess that there is a sort of inequality be tween the white and black races which justifies us in making them slaves, we must, then, insist that there is a degree of equality that requires us to make them our wives. He had never manifested any impatience, he proceeded to explain, with the necessities springing from the actual presence of black people, and the actual existence of slavery in' the South, but had maintained that in legislating for new coun tries where slavery did not exist, there was no just rule other than that of moral and abstract right - the rule of the Declara tion of Independence that all people have a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. This was not to be misunder stood, he said, except by men interested to misunderstand it. Granting that such a view could not be announced in a certain section of the country, he asked: Is it the true test of the soundness of a doctrine that in some places people won't let you proclaim it? Then 'he made a prediction. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.