The doctrine of self-government is right—absolutely and eternally right—but it has no just application as here attempted. Or perhaps I should rather say that whether it has such application depends upon whether a Negro is not or is a man. If he is not a man, in that case he who is a man may as a matter of self-government do just what he pleases with him. But if the Negro is a man, is it not to that extent a total destruction of self-government to say that he too shall not govern himself? When the white man governs himself, that is self-government; but when he governs himself and also governs another man, that is more than self-government—that is despotism. If the Negro is a man, why then my ancient faith teaches me that “all men are created equal,” and that there can be no moral right in connection with one man’s making a slave of another.[86] Lincoln knew the type of argument he had to oppose, and he correctly gauged its force. It was the argument from circumstance, which he treated as such argument requires to be treated. “Let us turn slavery from its claims of ‘moral right’ back upon its existing legal rights and its argument of ‘necessity.’”[87] He did not deny the “necessity”; he regarded it as something that could be taken care of in course of time. After the formation of the Republican Party, he often utilized his source in definition to point out the salient difference between Republicans and Democrats. The Democrats were playing up circumstance (the “necessity” alluded to in the above quotation) and to consequence (the saving of the Union through the placating of all sections) while the Republicans stood, at first a little forlornly, upon principle. As he put it during a speech at Springfield in 1857: The Republicans inculcate, with whatever of ability they can, that the Negro is a man, that his bondage is cruelly wrong, and that the field of his oppression ought not to be enlarged. The Democrats deny his manhood; deny, or dwarf to insignificance, the wrong of his bondage; so far as possible crush all sympathy for him, and cultivate and excite hatred and disgust against him; compliment themselves as Union-savers for doing so; and call the indefinite outspreading of his bondage “a sacred right of self-government.”[88] In the long contest with Douglas and the party of “popular sovereignty,” Lincoln’s principal charge was that his opponents, by straddling issues and through deviousness, were breaking down the essential definition of man. Repeatedly he referred to “this gradual and steady debauching of public opinion.” He made this charge because those who advocated local option in the matter of slavery were working unremittingly to change the Negro “from the rank of a man to that of a brute.” “They are taking him down,” he declared, “and placing him, when spoken of, among reptiles and crocodiles, as Judge Douglas himself expresses it.