over all the Territories and all the States, old as well as new, North as well as South. I enumerated the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, which every candid man must acknowledge conferred upon emigrants to Kansas and Nebraska the right to carry slaves there and hold them in bondage, whereas, formerly they had no such right. I alluded to the events which followed that repeal---events in which Judge Douglas' name figures quite prominently. I referred to the Dred Scott decision, and the extraordinary means taken to prepare the public mind for that decision---the efforts put forth by President Pierce to make the people believe they had indorsed, in the election of James Buchanan, the doctrine that slavery may exist in the free Territories of the Union---the earnest exhortation put forth by President Buchanan to the people to stick to that decision whatever it might be, [laughter] the close fitting niche in the Nebraska bill wherein the right of the people to govern themselves is made ``subject to the Constitution of the United States''---the extraordinary haste displayed by Mr. Douglas to give this decision an endorsement at the Capital of Illinois. I alluded to other occurring circumstances which I need not repeat now, and I said that though I could not open the bosoms of men and find out their secret motives, yet, when I found the framework for a barn or a bridge, or any other structure, built by a number of carpenters---Stephen and Franklin and Roger and James---and so built that each tenon had its proper mortice, and the whole forming a symmetrical piece of workmanship, I should say that these carpenters all worked on an intelligent plan, and understood each other from the beginning. This embraced the main argument in my speech before the Republican State convention in June. Judge Douglas received a copy of my speech some two weeks before his return to Illinois. He had ample time to examine and reply to it if he chose to do so. He did examine it, and he did reply to it, but he wholly overlooked the body of my argument, and said nothing about the ``conspiracy charge,'' as he terms it. He made up his speech of complaints against our tendencies to negro equality and amalgamation. [Laughter.] Well, seeing that Douglas had had the process served on him, that he had taken notice of such service, that he had come into court and pleaded to a part of the complaint, but had ignored the main issue, I took a default on him. I held that he had no plea to make to the general charge. So, when I was called on to reply to him twenty-four hours afterwards, I renewed the charge as explicitly as I could. My speech was reported and published on the following morning, and of course Judge Douglas saw it. He went from Chicago to Bloomington,