efinite delay of statehood if they should reject it.
Douglas, however, after some hesitation, refused to vote for the bill as
amended, and when the time came the Kansans, by more than five to one,
rejected the constitution and the bribe.

So the session brought no settlement, and Kansas was still the burning
issue when Douglas went back to Illinois and took the stump in the
senatorial campaign. Victor in a stirring parliamentary contest, this
time Chicago welcomed him. But there awaited him treason in the ranks of
his own party,--for the administration, beaten in Congress, attacked him
at home,--and an opposition now completely formed and led by a man whom
Douglas himself, in his own heart, dreaded as he had never dreaded the
ablest of his rivals at Washington. The Republicans had taken the
unusual course of holding a convention to nominate their candidate for
the Senate, and the candidate was Abraham Lincoln.

CHAPTER V

THE RIVALS

Hamilton and Jefferson, Clay and Jackson, Douglas and Lincoln,--these
are the three great rivalries of American politics. The third was not
the least. If it fell short of the others in variety of confrontments,
if it was not so long drawn out, or accompanied with so frequent and
imposing alignments and realignments of vast contending forces on a
broad and national field, it surpassed them in the clearness of the sole
and vital issue it involved, in a closer contact and measuring of
powers, in the complete and subtle correspondence of the characters of
the rivals to the causes for which they fought.

Douglas was the very type of that instant success which waits on ability
undistracted by doubt and undeterred by the fear of doing wrong; the
best exemplar of that American statesmanship which accepted things as
they were and made the most of them. Facile, keen, effective, he had
found life a series of opportunities easily embraced. Precocious in
youth, marvelously active in manhood, he had learned without study,
resolved without meditation, accomplished without toil. Whatever
obstacles he had found in his path, he had either adroitly avoided them
or boldly overleaped them, but never laboriously uprooted them. Whatever
subject he had taken in hand, he had swiftly compassed it, but rarely
probed to the heart of it. With books he dealt as he dealt with men,
getting from them quickly what he liked or needed; he was as unlikely to
pore over a volume, and dog-ear and annotate it, as he w