bridge
the gulf between the two oceans. The thought of all those millions of
acres of virgin land, the property of the American Commonwealth, crying
out for the sower and the reaper, rode his imagination as the wrongs of
the Negro slave rode the imagination of Garrison. There is a reality
about the comparison which few will recognize, for this demagogue, whom
men devoted to the Slavery issue thought cynical, had about him also
something of the fanatic. He could forget all else in his one
enthusiasm. It is the key to his career from the day when he entered
Congress clamouring for Oregon or war with England to the day when he
died appealing for soldiers to save the Union in the name of its common
inheritance. And it is surely not surprising that, for the fulfilment of
his vision, he was willing to conciliate the slave-owners, when one
remembers that in earlier days he had been willing to conciliate the
Mormons.

Douglas stands out in history, as we now see it, as the man who by the
Kansas and Nebraska Bill upset the tottering Compromise of 1850. Why did
he so upset it? Not certainly because he wished to reopen the Slavery
Question; nothing is less likely, for it was a question in which he
avowedly felt no interest and the raising of which was bound to unsettle
his plans. Not from personal ambition; for those who accuse him of
having acted as he did for private advantage have to admit that in fact
he lost by it. Why then did he so act? I think we shall get to the root
of the matter if we assume that his motive in introducing his celebrated
Bill was just the avowed motive of that Bill and no other. It was to set
up territorial governments in Kansas and Nebraska. Douglas's mind was
full of schemes for facilitating the march of American civilization
westward, for piercing the prairies with roads and railways, for opening
up communications with Oregon and the Pacific Slope. Kansas and
Nebraska were then the outposts of such expansion. Naturally he was
eager to develop them, to encourage squatters to settle within their
borders, and for that purpose to give them an assured position and a
form of stable government. If he could have effected this without
touching the Slavery Question I think that he would gladly have done so.
And, as a matter of fact, the Nebraska Bill as originally drafted by him
was innocent of the clause which afterwards caused so much controversy.
That clause was forced on him by circumstances.

The greater