ouglas's friends had seen to it that
nothing on their part should be wanting to secure success. What with
special car trains, and weighty deputations, and imposing processions,
and flag raisings, the inspiration of music, the booming of cannon, and
the eager shouts of an enthusiastic populace, his political journey
through Illinois had been more like a Royal Progress than anything the
Country had yet seen; and now that his reelection was accomplished, they
proposed to make the most of it--to extend, as it were, the sphere of
his triumph, or vindication, so that it would include not the State
alone, but the Nation--and thus so accentuate and enhance his
availability as a candidate for the Democratic Presidential nomination
of 1860, as to make his nomination and election to the Presidency of the
United States an almost foregone conclusion.

The programme was to raise so great a popular tidal-wave in his
interest, as would bear him irresistibly upon its crest to the White
House. Accordingly, as the idol of the Democratic popular heart,
Douglas, upon his return to the National Capital, was triumphantly
received by the chief cities of the Mississippi and the Atlantic
sea-board. Hailed as victor in the great political contest in Illinois
--upon the extended newspaper reports of which, the absorbed eyes of the
entire nation, for months, had greedily fed--Douglas was received with
much ostentation and immense enthusiasm at St. Louis, Memphis, New
Orleans, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington. Like the
"Triumphs" decreed by Rome, in her grandest days, to the greatest of her
victorious heroes, Douglas's return was a series of magnificent popular
ovations.

In a speech made two years before this period, Mr. Lincoln, while
contrasting his own political career with that of Douglas, and modestly
describing his own as "a flat failure" had said: "With him it has been
one of splendid success. His name fills the Nation, and is not unknown
even in foreign lands. I affect no contempt for the high eminence he
has reached. So reached, that the oppressed of my species might have
shared with me in the elevation, I would rather stand on that eminence
than wear the richest crown that ever pressed a monarch's brow." And
now the star of Douglas had reached a higher altitude, nearing its
meridian splendor. He had become the popular idol of the day.

But Douglas's partial victory--if such it was--so far from settling the
publ