Page:Life and Works of Abraham Lincoln, v6.djvu/52

 30 SPEECHES [Feb. 27

to, contend for, the identical old policy on the point in controversy which was adopted by "our fathers who framed the government under v/hich we live"; while you with one accord reject, and scout, and spit upon that old policy, and insist upon substituting something new. True, you dis- agree among yourselves as to what that substitute shall be. You are divided on new propositions and plans, but you are unanimous in rejecting and denouncing the old policy of the fathers. Some of you are for reviving the foreign slave- trade ; some for a congressional slave code for the Territories ; some for Congress forbidding the Territories to prohibit slavery within their limits ; some for maintaining slavery in the Ter- ritories through the judiciary; some for the "gur- reat pur-rinciple" that "if one man would enslave another, no third man should object," fantastic- ally calle'l "popular sovereignty" ; but never a man among you is in favor of Federal prohibition of slavery in Federal Territories, according to the practice of "our fathers who framed the govern- ment under which we live." Not one of all your various plans can show a precedent or an advo- cate in the century within which our government originated. Consider, then, whether your claim of conservatism for yourselves, and your charge of destructiveness against us, are based on the most clear and stable foundations.

Again, you say we have made the slavery ques- tion more prominent than it formerly was. We deny it. We admit that it is more prominent, but we deny that we made it so. It was not we, but you, who discarded the old policy of the fathers. We resisted, and still resist, your inno- vation ; and thence comes the greater prominence