ative, and as the more rapid
increase of population in the free States destroyed in the House that
balance of the sections which in the Senate was still carefully
maintained. Moreover, the country no longer sent its strongest men into
the White House, and the Supreme Court was no longer favorable to that
theory of the government which, as Marshall expounded it, had tended so
markedly to elevate the court itself. The upper house had gained not
merely as against the lower, but as against the executive and the
judiciary. The ablest and most experienced statesmen were apt to be
senators; and the Senate was the true battleground in a contest that was
beginning to dwarf all others. From the beginning to the end of
Douglas's service there, saving a brief, delusive interval after the
Compromise of 1850, the slavery question in its territorial phase was
constantly uppermost, and in the Senate, if anywhere, those measures
must be devised, those compromises agreed on, which should save the
country from disunion or war. There was open to him, therefore, a path
to eminence which, difficult as it might prove, was at least a plain
one. To win among his fellows in the Senate a leadership such as he had
readily won among his fellows at school, at Jacksonville, at
Springfield, in the legislature and the Democratic organization of
Illinois, and such as he was rising to in the lower house when he left
it, and then to find and establish the right policy with slavery, and
particularly with slavery in the Territories--there lay his path. It was
a task that demanded the highest powers, a public service adequate to
the loftiest patriotism. How he did, in fact, attempt it, how nearly he
succeeded in it, and why he failed in it, are the inquiries with which
any study of his life must be chiefly concerned.

But Douglas was too alert and alive to limit his share in legislation
to a single subject or class of subjects. Save that he does not appear
to have taken up the tariff question in any conspicuous way, he had a
leading part in all the important discussions of his time, whether in
the Senate or before the people. Unquestionably, his would be the best
name to choose if one were attempting to throw into biographical form a
political history of the period of his senatorship.

The very day he took his seat, he was appointed chairman of the Senate
Committee on Territories, and so kept the role of sponsor for young
commonwealths which he had begun to