safeguards to liberty are broken down, as is now attempted, when they have made _things_ of all the free negroes, how long, think you, before they will begin to make _things_ of poor white men? [Applause.] Be not deceived. Revolutions do not go backward. The founder of the Democratic party declared that _all_ men were created equal. His successor in the leadership has written the word “white” before men, making it read “all _white_ men are created equal.” Pray, will or may not the Know-nothings, if they should get in power, add the word “protestant,” making it read “_all protestant white men_”? Meanwhile the hapless negro is the fruitful subject of reprisals in other quarters. John Pettit, whom Tom Benton paid his respects to, you will recollect, calls the immortal Declaration “a self-evident lie”; while at the birthplace of freedom--in the shadow of Bunker Hill and of the “cradle of liberty,” at the home of the Adamses and Warren and Otis--Choate, from our side of the house, dares to fritter away the birthday promise of liberty by proclaiming the Declaration to be “a string of glittering generalities”; and the Southern Whigs, working hand in hand with pro-slavery Democrats, are making Choate’s theories practical. Thomas Jefferson, a slaveholder, mindful of the moral element in slavery, solemnly declared that he “trembled for his country when he remembered that God is just”; while Judge Douglas, with an insignificant wave of the hand, “don’t care whether slavery is voted up or voted down.” Now, if slavery is right, or even negative, he has a right to treat it in this trifling manner. But if it is a moral and political wrong, as all Christendom considers it to be, how can he answer to God for this attempt to spread and fortify it? [Applause.] But no man, and Judge Douglas no more than any other, can maintain a negative, or merely neutral, position on this question; and, accordingly, he avows that the Union was made _by_ white men and _for_ white men and their descendants. As matter of fact, the first branch of the proposition is historically true; the government was made by white men, and they were and are the superior race. This I admit. But the corner-stone of the government, so to speak, was the declaration that “_all_ men are created equal,” and all entitled to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” [Applause.]