than cotton. What was to be done by a man who had the burdens
of leadership? How should the whole people be at peace? Since slavery
could not be removed from the states, why not let its tendrils creep
into the territories and there flourish or wither according to the soil?
Since it was practical, not radical policy to confine it to the states,
and not to abolish it in the states, it was practical and not radical
policy to let the territories decide the matter for themselves. If the
first course aroused the fury of the Abolitionists, the second course
found no favor with the Free Soilers, and ambitious Whigs, drawing upon
abolitionism and free soilism for food, for northern mercantilism and
for a larger slavery of both blacks and whites.

I had now lived so long in America, seen so much of the country, read so
extensively of politics and history, that I was able to follow the
questions involved in this crisis. All the while I had the benefit of
Douglas' association, who talked to me intimately of his own plans and
of persons and issues, as they arose. There were calls upon him now to
resign the Senatorship; but he had no intention of doing so. His
fighting blood was aroused. He was hardened to contests and to
misunderstanding and abuse. He had been berated for coarseness and
charged with the half-culture of the West. His sagacity had been
caricatured as cunning; his presence of mind taken for vulgar audacity;
he was held up as a half-educated debater, filled with a miserable
self-sufficiency. He was attacked as a demagogue. The East held itself
aloof from him in unctuous self-righteousness, because of his stand in
the Mexican War. His fight for Oregon had aligned against him the
friends of England in America. Yet men were in power because of him. A
Whig had been elected President upon a war record of a fight for Texas.
Who wished to part with Texas, New Mexico, California, or Oregon?

If Douglas had the slavocracy back of him and catered to it, he did not
have plutocracy back of him. If he had been a demagogue he would have
done the bidding of some faction. He did the bidding of no faction. His
mind was budding with railroads now, for the Far West. What he was now
doing made for a money control of the country in the future; but that
was not apparent to him. What one of us saw that we could not make an
ocean-bound republic without a supremacy of wealth, even if it was
brought about by a plebiscite? This did not make it de