play in the House. No other public
man has ever had so much to do with the organizing of Territories and
the admitting of States into the Union; probably no other man ever so
completely mastered all the details of such legislation. He reported the
bills by which Utah, New Mexico, Washington, Kansas, Nebraska, Oregon,
and Minnesota became Territories, and those by which Texas, Iowa,
Florida, California, Wisconsin, Oregon, and Minnesota became States.
His familiarity with all questions concerning the public domain was not
less remarkable. In dealing with both subjects, he seems always to have
been guided by his confidence in the Western people themselves. He was
for a liberal policy with individual settlers, holding that the
government, in disposing of its lands, should aim at development and not
at profit; and he was no less liberal in his view of the rights and
privileges with which each new political community ought to be invested.
As to the lands, he held to such a policy as looked forward to the time
when they should be turned into farms and towns and cities. As to the
government of the Territories, he held to such a policy with them as
looked constantly forward to their becoming States, and his theory was
that all the powers of the general government in reference to them were
based on its power to admit States into the Union. To that rule of
construction, however, he made a very notable exception. Declaring that
the Mormons were for the most part aliens by birth, that they were
trying to subvert the authority of the United States, that they
themselves were unfit for citizenship and their community unfit for
membership in the Union, he favored the repeal of the act by which the
territorial government of Utah was set up. He went farther, and
maintained that only such territory as is set apart to form new States
must be governed in accordance with those constitutional clauses which
relate to the admission of States, and that territory acquired or held
for other purposes could be governed quite without reference to any
rights which through statehood, or the expectation of statehood, its
inhabitants might claim. This theory of his has assumed in our later
history an interest and importance far beyond any it had at the time;
but Douglas in that and in many other of his speeches clearly had in
mind just such exigencies as have brought us to a practical adoption of
his view.

His interest in the government's efforts to dev