"is antiquated, decrepit, tottering on the verge of
dissolution. When you visit her, the objects which excite your
admiration are the relics of past greatness: the broken columns erected
to departed power. Here everything is fresh, blooming, expanding, and
advancing. We wish a wise, practical policy adapted to our condition and
position."

A more ardent and thoroughgoing expansionist is not to be found among
eminent Americans of that time, or even of later times. While he was
denouncing General Walker's lawless invasion of Central America in 1858,
he took pains to make it plain that it was the filibusters' method, and
not their object, which he condemned. In fact, he condemned their method
chiefly because its tendency was to defeat their object.

He believed that England, notwithstanding the kinship of the two peoples
and the similarity of their civilizations, was our rival by necessity,
our ill-wisher because of the past. The idea that we were bound to the
mother country by ties of gratitude or affection he always combated. He
denied her motherhood as a historical proposition, and demanded to know
of Senator Butler, of South Carolina, who was moved to eloquence over
America's debt to England for a language and a literature, whether he
was duly grateful also for English criticism of our institutions, and
particularly for the publications of English abolitionists. As to the
British claim of a right to search American vessels for slaves, he was
for bringing the matter at once to an issue; for denying the right _in
toto_; and if Great Britain chose to treat our resistance as a cause of
war, he would be for prolonging the war until the British flag should
disappear forever from the American continent and the adjacent islands.

CHAPTER III

THE GREAT QUESTION

On all these questions, alike of domestic and of foreign policy, Douglas
took an eminently hopeful, an eminently confident and resolute stand.
His opinions were such as befitted a strong, competent, successful man.
They were characteristic of the West. They were based on a positive
faith in democracy, in our constitution of government, in the American
people. In that faith, likewise, he addressed himself to the problem
which in his day, as before and after, was perplexing the champions of
democracy and giving pause to the well-wishers of the Republic. A later
generation has learned to think of that problem as the negro question, a
race question; Douglas's