"These are my views and these are the principles to which I have devoted all my energies since 1850, when I acted side by side with the immortal Clay and the god-like Webster in that memorable struggle in which the Whigs and the Democrats united upon a common platform of patriotism and the Constitution. * * * And when I stood beside the death-bed of Mr. Clay and heard him refer with feelings and emotions of the deepest solicitude to the welfare of the country, and saw that he looked upon the principle embodied in the great Compromise of 1850, the principle of the Nebraska bill, the doctrine of leaving each State and Territory free to decide its institutions for itself, as the only means by which the peace of the country could be preserved and the Union perpetuated. I pledged him on that death-bed of his that so long as I lived my energy should be devoted to the vindication of that principle and of his fame as connected with it. I gave the same pledge to the great expounder of the Constitution, he who has been called the god-like Webster. I looked up to Clay and him as a son would to a father, and I call upon the people of Illinois and the people of the whole Union to bear testimony that never since the sod has been laid upon the graves of these eminent statesmen have I failed on any occasion to vindicate the principle with which the last great crowning acts of their lives were identified. * * * And now my life and energy are devoted to this work as the means of preserving this Union. * * * It can be maintained by preserving the sovereignty of the States, the right of each State and each Territory to settle its domestic concerns for itself and the duty of each to refrain from interfering with the other in any of its local or domestic institutions. Let that be done, and the Union will be perpetuated. Let that be done, and this Republic which began with thirteen States and which now numbers thirty-two, which when it began only extended from the Atlantic to the Mississippi, but now reaches to the Pacific, may yet expand north and south until it covers the whole continent and becomes one vast, ocean-bound Confederacy. * * * * Let us maintain the great principles of popular sovereignty, of State rights and of the Federal Union as the Constitution has made it, and this Republic will endure forever." On the following day he spoke at Springfield, repeating his Bloomington speech with slight abridgment. In the evening, Lincoln, who had attended Douglas' Bloomington meeting and accompanied him to Springfield, spoke to a large audience. He twitted him for his noisy, spectacular campaign, "the thunderings of cannon, the marching and music, the fizzle-gigs and fireworks. * * *