Page:The World's Famous Orations Volume 9.djvu/245

 LINCOLN nounces decisions. He makes statutes and de- cisions possible or impossible to be executed. This must be borne in mind, as also the addi- tional fact that Judge Douglas is a man of vast influence, so. great that it is enough for many men to profess to believe anything when they once find out that Judge Douglas professes to believe it. Consider also the attitude he occupies at the head of a large party — a party which he claims has a majority of all the voters in the country. This man sticks to a decision which forbids the people of a Territory to exclude slavery, and he does so not because he says it is right in itself — ^he does not give any opinion on that — but because it has been decided by the court, and, being decided by the court, he is, and you are, bound to take it in your political action as law — ^not that he judges at all of its merits, but because a decision of the court is to him a p^/ound alone, and you will bear in mind that riius committing himself unreservedly to this de- cision, commits himself on account of the merit or demerit of the decision, but it is a **Thu3 saith the Lord.'* The next decision, as much as this, will be a **Thus saith the Lord." There is nothing that can divert or turn him away from this decision. It is nothing that I point out to him that his great prototype, General Jackson, did not believe in the binding force of decisions. It is nothing to him that Jefferson did not so believe. 235
 * 'Thus saith the Lord/' He places it on that