What then was the course of the champion of Popular Sovereignty? Did he thunder and lighten? Did he come forward to defend those settlers, who had gone to Kansas under pretended safeguards of his bill? Oh, no! In the Senate he openly ranged himself on the side of their oppressors, mocked at their calamities, denounced them as “insurgents,” insulted their agents, and told them they must submit,--while the distant Emigrant Aid Society in Massachusetts was made the butt of his most opprobrious assaults. All this I myself witnessed. Then came another scene, with which, owing to my enforced absence from the Senate, as an invalid, I have less personal familiarity; but it is known to all of you. The Senatorial election in Illinois was at hand, when Mr. Douglas suddenly discovered that Popular Sovereignty was something more than a name. He opposed the Lecompton Constitution; but my distinguished colleague [Mr. WILSON] will tell you that even there he was kept from barefaced apostasy only by the stern will and indomitable principle of the lamented Broderick, the murdered Senator from California. Then came stump speeches and Senate speeches without number, and a magazine article, all to explain Popular Sovereignty. But this simple principle, which, in the light of the Declaration of Independence, and also in the light of reason, is plain enough, has been so twisted, turned, and befogged, now explained away and then explained back, now enlarged and then limited, now acknowledged and then denied, that I challenge any person to say with certainty in what, according to Mr. Douglas, it really consists. At one time we find him declaring that “Slavery is the creature of local law, and not of the Constitution of the United States.” Good! Let him follow this to its natural conclusion, and no Republican asks more. Then, at New Orleans, after his election to the Senate was secured, he says: “The Democracy of Illinois accept the decision of the Supreme Court of the United States in the case of Dred Scott as an authoritative interpretation of the Constitution. In accordance with that decision, we hold that slaves are property, and hence on an equality with all other kinds of property, and that the owner of a slave has the same right to move into a Territory and carry his slave property with him as the owner of any other property has to go there and carry his property.” Here is the extreme dogma of Slavery in full feather. Let him follow this to its natural conclusion, and no Breckinridge man could ask more. At another time we find him declaring that “sovereign States have the right to make their own constitutions and establish their own governments, but that he has never claimed these powers for the Territories, nor has he ever failed to resist such claims, when set up by others.” How, then, under this theory, can Popular Sovereignty have any foothold in the Territories? It is clear that all Territorial legislation against Slavery must be invalid.