The consciousness that he was made to seem morally obtuse, cut Douglas to the quick. Even upon his tough constitution this prolonged campaign was beginning to tell. His voice was harsh and broken; and he gave unmistakable signs of nervous irritability, brought on by physical fatigue. When he rose to reply to Lincoln, his manner was offensively combative. At the outset, he referred angrily to Lincoln's "gross personalities and base insinuations."[761] In his references to the Springfield resolutions and to his mistake, or rather the mistake of his friends at the capital, he was particularly denunciatory. "When I make a mistake," he boasted, "as an honest man, I correct it without being asked to, but when he, Lincoln, makes a false charge, he sticks to it and never corrects it."[762] But Douglas was too old a campaigner to lose control of himself, and no doubt the rude charge and counter-charge were prompted less by personal ill-will than by controversial exigencies. Those who have conceived Douglas as the victim of deep-seated and abiding resentment toward Lincoln, forget the impulsive nature of the man. There is not the slightest evidence that Lincoln took these blows to heart. He had himself dealt many a vigorous blow in times past. It was part of the game. Douglas found fault with Lincoln's answers to the Ottawa questions: "I ask you again, Lincoln, will you vote to admit New Mexico, when she has the requisite population with such a constitution as her people adopt, either recognizing slavery or not, as they shall determine!" He was well within the truth when he asserted that Lincoln's answer had been purposely evasive and equivocal, "having no reference to any territory now in existence."[763] Of Lincoln's Republican policy of confining slavery within its present limits, by prohibiting it in the Territories, he said, "When he gets it thus confined, and surrounded, so that it cannot spread, the natural laws of increase will go on until the negroes will be so plenty that they cannot live on the soil. He will hem them in until starvation seizes them, and by starving them to death, he will put slavery in the course of ultimate extinction."[764] A silly argument which Douglas's wide acquaintance with Southern conditions flatly contradicted and should have kept him from repeating. To the charge of moral obliquity on the slavery question, Douglas made a dignified and worthy reply. "I hold that the people of the slave-holding States are civilized men as well as ourselves; that they bear consciences as well as we, and that they are accountable to God and their posterity, and not to us. It is for them to decide, therefore, the moral and religious right of the slavery question for themselves within their own limits."[765]