"For this, if for no other public service to his State, the name of Douglas was justly entitled to preservation by the erection of that splendid monumental column which, overlooking the blue waters of Lake Michigan, also overlooks for long distance that iron highway which was in no small degree the triumph of his legislative forecast and genius." The measure now to be mentioned aroused deeper attention--more anxious concern--throughout the entire country than any with which the name of Douglas had yet been closely associated. It pertained directly to slavery, the "bone of contention" between the North and the South, the one dangerous quantity in our national politics from the establishment of the Government. Beginning with its recognition--though not in direct terms--in the Federal Constitution, it had through two generations, in the interest of peace, been the subject of repeated compromise. As chairman of the Senate Committee on Territories, Douglas in the early days of 1854 reported a bill providing for the organization of the Territories of Nebraska and Kansas. This measure, which so suddenly arrested public attention, is known in our political history as the "Kansas-Nebraska Bill." Among its provisions was one repealing the Missouri Compromise or restriction of 1820. The end sought by the repeal was, as stated by Douglas, to leave the people of said Territories respectively to determine the question of the introduction or exclusion of slavery for themselves; in other words, "to regulate their domestic institutions in their own way, subject only to the Constitution of the United States." The principle strenuously contended for was that of "popular sovereignty" or non-intervention by Congress, in the affairs of the Territories. In closing the protracted and exciting debate just prior to the passage of the bill in the Senate, he said: "There is another reason why I desire to see this principle recognized as a rule of action in all time to come. It will have the effect to destroy all sectional parties and sectional agitation. If you withdraw the slavery question from the halls of Congress and the political arena, and commit it to the arbitrament of those who are immediately interested in and alone responsible for its consequences, there is nothing left out of which sectional parties can be organized. When the people of the North shall all be rallied under one banner, and the whole South marshalled under another banner, and each section excited to frenzy and madness by hostility to the institutions of the other, then the patriot may well tremble for the perpetuity of the Union. Withdraw the slavery question from the political arena and remove it to the States and Territories, each to decide for itself, and such a catastrophe can never happen."