rry out to its logical results the doctrine of the compromise of
1850; and that he bore himself bravely and well through the trying
ordeal, and against fearful odds, even his bitterest foes must admit.

Stephen A. Douglas, of Illinois, was but 37 years of age when he stood
in the United States Senate, one of the ablest of the supporters of the
compromise of 1850. His own hand had drawn the bills to admit California
as a Free State, and to organize Utah and New Mexico. Among the
venerable princes of the Senate, he was their equal, and Henry Clay, the
noblest Roman of them all, moved by Mr. Douglas' magnanimity on that
occasion, pronounced him to be "the most generous man living."

In 1854 Mr. Douglas carried through the Congress of the United States
and through a parliamentary warfare, in which no other man than he could
have triumphed, the bill to organize the territories of Kansas and
Nebraska, declaring inoperative and void the Missouri geographical
compromise line, and affirming the true intent and meaning of the Kansas
and Nebraska act to be, "_to leave the people of any State or territory
perfectly free to form and regulate their domestic institutions in their
own way, subject only to the Constitution of the United States_."

In this short "_stump speech in the belly of the bill_," as Thomas H.
Benton and Republican orators after him have, by way of ridicule, been
pleased to call it, is the key to the law which must ever govern its
true interpretation, and it puts to the rout all the arguments that have
been made to prove that non-intervention and popular or territorial
sovereignty are not in the Kansas and Nebraska bill, except in small
fractions.

A measure so radical and far-reaching as the formal annulling of the
Missouri compromise line, could not fail to meet at first with terrific
opposition. It broke in on old habits and ways of thinking--it stirred
up men's opinions to the roots--it took thought from the surface and
forms of things to their substance--it brought democracy to the test. It
put to the nation the pregnant questions: Are the rights of white men
and black men, the claims of freedom and humanity to be trusted to the
white men of the American territories, as well as American States, or
are they not? Are free white American citizens in American territories,
as well as American States, competent to decide the question of African
slavery or not? Are they competent to govern themselves or not? It di