A few years later, when questioned concerning that utterance, he said: "All questions of social and moral reform find lodgement first with enlightened souls, who stamp them with their approval. In God's own time they will be organized into law, and thus woven into the fabric of our institutions." [Illustration: A. Lincoln.] In 1836 he met Stephen A. Douglas for the first time, at the State capital. In 1837 he was admitted to the bar, in 1838 re-elected to the Legislature, and again in 1840. The capital had been removed from Vandalia to Springfield, and in partnership with John T. Stuart he began the practice of law in that city in 1839. On November 4, 1842, he was married to Mary Todd, daughter of Hon. Robert S. Todd. In the presidential campaigns of 1840 and 1844 he canvassed the State as a presidential elector on the whig ticket; and in both campaigns was pitted, in joint debate, against Stephen A. Douglas. In 1846 he was elected to the thirtieth Congress, and was the only whig representative in that body from Illinois. On January 12, 1848, he made his first speech in Congress, on a resolution which he offered calling on the president to provide a statement relating to the war with Mexico. On January 16, 1849, he introduced a bill to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia and to compensate the owners of the liberated slaves. He declined a re-election to Congress, and in 1849 was an unsuccessful candidate for United States senator. In 1850 he refused to accept the appointment as Governor of Oregon, tendered him by President Fillmore. For a few years he gave no attention to political matters, but the introduction in Congress of the bill to admit Nebraska and Kansas to the Union, and the agitation for the repeal of the "Missouri Compromise," aroused his interest, and in a short time he became the leader of a new party in the State. All who opposed the repeal of that compromise, of whatever party, were known as "Anti-Nebraska" in the beginning, but gradually they began to call themselves "Republicans," and as such they carried most of the "Free State" elections of 1854. Senator Douglas, in defending his course on the "Nebraska Bill," made speeches through Illinois. On October 1, 1854, Lincoln, in reply to one of these speeches, in speaking of slavery said: "I hate it because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world; it enables the enemies of free institutions to taunt us as hypocrites; causes the real friends of freedom to doubt our sincerity; is at war with the vital principles of civic liberty; contrary to the Declaration of Independence; and maintains that there is no right principle of action but self-interest.... No man is good enough to govern another man without the other's consent.... I object to the Nebraska Bill because it assumes there can be moral right in the enslaving of one man by another."