ely upon the Senate as he did upon the people of Illinois and
the North generally. He was, no doubt, a remarkable man, with the gift
of attracting many people. A political opponent has described vividly
how at first sight he was instantly repelled by the sinister and
dangerous air of Douglas' scowl; a still stronger opponent, but a
woman, Mrs. Beecher Stowe, seems on the contrary to have found it
impossible to hate him. What he now did displayed at any rate a
sporting quality.

In the course of 1854 Stephen Douglas while in charge of an inoffensive
Bill dealing with the government of Kansas and Nebraska converted it
into a form in which it empowered the people of Kansas at any time to
decide for themselves whether they would permit slavery or not, and in
express terms repealed the Missouri Compromise. With the easy
connivance of President Pierce and the enthusiastic support of the
Southerners, and by some extraordinary exercise of his art as demagogue
and Parliamentarian, he triumphantly ran this measure through.

Just how it came about seems to be rather obscure, but it is easy to
conjecture his motives. Trained in a school in which scruple or
principle were unknown and the man who arrives is the great man,
Douglas, like other such adventurers, was accessible to visions of a
sort. He cared nothing whether negroes were slaves or not, and
doubtless despised Northern and Southern sentiment on that subject
equally; as he frankly said once, on any question between white men and
negroes he was on the side of the white men, and on any question
between negroes and crocodiles he would be on the side of the negroes.
But he did care for the development of the great national heritage in
the West, that subject of an easy but perfectly wholesome patriotic
pride with which we are familiar. It must have been a satisfaction to
him to feel that North and South would now have an equal chance in that
heritage, and also that the white settlers in the West would be
relieved of any restriction on their freedom. None the less his action
was to the last degree reckless. The North had shown itself ready in
1850 to put up with a great deal of quiet invasion of its former
principle, but to lay hands upon the sacred letter of the Act in which
that principle was enshrined was to invite exciting consequences.

The immediate consequences were two-fold. In the first place Southern
settlers came pouring into Kansas and Northern settlers in