ar and concise
statements and arguments to justify the belief that had his life
been unreservedly given to the profession of the law, his
talents concentrated upon the mastery of its eternal principles,
he would in the end have been amply rewarded "by that mistress who
is at the same time so jealous and so just." This, however, was
not to be, and to a field more alluring his footsteps were now
turned. Abandoning the bench to men less ambitious, he was soon
embarked upon the uncertain and delusive sea of politics.

His unsuccessful opponent for Congress in 1842 was the Hon. Orville
H. Browning, with whom, in the State Legislature, he had measured swords
over a partisan resolution sustaining the financial policy of
President Jackson. "The whirligig of time brings in his revenges,"
and it so fell out that near two decades later it was the fortune of
Mr. Browning to occupy a seat in the Senate as the successor of
Douglas--"touched by the finger of death." At a later day, Mr.
Browning, as a member of the Cabinet of President Johnson, acquitted
himself with honor in the discharge of the exacting duties of
Secretary of the Interior. So long as men of high aims, patriotic
hearts, and noble achievements are held in grateful remembrance,
his name will have honored place in our country's annals.

The career upon which Douglas now entered was the one for which he
was pre-eminently fitted, and to which he had aspired from the
beginning. It was a career in which national fame was to be
achieved, and--by re-elections to the House, and later to the Senate
--to continue without interruption to the last hour of his life.
He took his seat in the House of Representatives, December 5, 1843,
and among his colleagues were Semple and Breese of the Senate, and
Hardin, McClernand, Ficklin, and Wentworth of the House. Mr.
Stephens of Georgia,--with whom it was my good fortune to serve in
the forty-fourth and forty-sixth Congresses--told me that he entered
the House the same day with Douglas, and that he distinctly recalled
the delicate and youthful appearance of the latter as he advanced to
the Speaker's desk to receive the oath of office. Conspicuous
among the leaders of the House in the twenty-eighth Congress were
Hamilton Fish, Washington Hunt, Henry A. Wise, Howell Cobb, Joshua
R. Giddings, Linn Boyd, John Slidell, Barnwell Rhett, Robert C.
Winthrop, the Speaker, Hannibal Hamlin, elected Vice-President upon
the ticket with Mr. Linc