should say so. This is the key to the whole question at issue, and it will put a different complexion on the campaign.
The remainder of Judge Douglas's speech was particularly severe, as well as logical and powerful. I will attempt no further description of it, as you can read it almost as soon as this.
When Lincoln commenced his reply, he was evidently laboring under great embarrassment. When he had spoken only twenty minutes, he turned round and asked the moderator how near his time was up! Poor fellow! he was writhing in the powerful grasp of an intellectual giant. His speech amounted to nothing. It was made up with such expressions as "I think it is so," "I may be mistaken," "I guess it was done," &c., &c. There were no straightforward assertions and logical conclusions, such as fall from the lips of Douglas. He spent over half an hour reading from some old speech that he had previously made on Abolitionism. As he continued reading, there were numerous voices exclaiming: "What book is that you are reading from?" This tended to increase his confusion, and after blundering and whining along, and endeavoring to tell anecdotes and nursery tales, he sat down at the end of one hour and fifteen minutes, a quarter of an hour before the expiration of his time, without alluding to one of the questions put to him by Judge Douglas. He dodged them all, not daring to give an answer. But they will be put to him again, and there is no alternative now but to "face the music."
When Judge Douglas rose to reply, his countenance brightened up with that peculiar intellectual and demolishing look that he is so famous for when he is about to make a great point. He electrified the crowd at once. Could you have seen those looks, and heard those burning words of sarcasm, as he commenced to rend his antagonist to atoms, you would have been obliged to admit that it was the culminating period of his life. He poured forth a torrent of logic and sarcasm blended in one strain, that was astonishing. Turning around and facing Lincoln, who was beginning to get very blue about his chops, he impaled him at once—then clutching him in his intellectual grasp, he held him up before the crowd as it were, in imagination, till you could see him like a captivated spider. He reiterated his questions and informed him that there must be no more dodging, and that he was "determined to screw an answer out of him." He reviewed Lincoln's political career, and showed how he had distinguished himself when in Congress by taking sides with the enemy, and how he voted
