Page:Speeches of Carl Schurz (IA speechesofcarlsc00schu).pdf/182

172 ritory would have at least the sovereign right to remove, and exclude it by a positive act of Territorial legislation. Is that what Judge Douglas's principle of popular sovereignty contemplated? By no means! He told you at first that this was a question to be decided by the Supreme Court; then he told you that the sovereignty of a Territory remains in abeyance, suspended in the United States, in trust for the people, until they shall be admitted into the Union as a State; and, at last, after the Illinois campaign, he dropped the expression “excluding slavery” altogether. It is significant that the attempts of the people of Nebraska and Kansas to exclude slavery by law were promptly put down by the vetoes of the Governors of those Territories, vetoes exercised by virtue of the power conferred on the Territorial Governments by Douglas's own Nebraska Bill.

Thus we have descended two great steps from the true idea of popular sovereignty, without having reached Judge Douglas's great principle; and you will perceive that the true popular sovereignty has already disappeared long ago. But let us lower the standard of popular sovereignty still another degree, and we may hope that the deeper we sink the closer we may approach Judge Douglas's position. At last we find him, not with a principle, but with an assumption. “It matters not,” said he, in his Freeport speech in August, 1858:

“It matters not what way the Supreme Court may hereafter decide as to the abstract question, whether slavery may go or may not go into a Territory under the Constitution, the people have the lawful means to introduce it or exclude it as they please; for the reason that slavery cannot exist a day or an hour anywhere unless it is supported by local police regulations. Those police regulations can only be established by the local Legislature; and if the people are opposed to slavery, they