Upon one auditor, who to be sure was inexpressibly bored by the whole discussion of the "everlasting general ticket elections," Douglas made an unhappy impression. John Quincy Adams recorded in his diary,--that diary which was becoming a sort of Rogues' Gallery: "He now raved out his hour in abusive invectives upon the members who had pointed out its slanders and upon the Whig party. His face was convulsed, his gesticulation frantic, and he lashed himself into such a heat that if his body had been made of combustible matter, it would have burnt out. In the midst of his roaring, to save himself from choking, he stripped off and cast away his cravat, and unbuttoned his waist-coat, and had the air and aspect of a half-naked pugilist. And this man comes from a judicial bench, and passes for an eloquent orator."[174] No one will mistake this for an impartial description. Nearly every Democrat who spoke upon this tedious question, according to Adams, either "raved" or "foamed at the mouth." The old gentleman was too wearied and disgusted with the affair to be a fair reporter. But as a caricature, this picture of the young man from Illinois certainly hits off the style which he affected, in common with most Western orators. Notwithstanding his very substantial services to his party, Douglas had sooner or later to face his constituents with an answer to the crucial question, "What have you done for us?" It is a hard, brutal question, which has blighted many a promising career in American politics. The interest which Douglas exhibited in the Western Harbors bill was due, in part at least, to his desire to propitiate those by virtue of whose suffrages he was a member of the House of Representatives. At the same time, he was no doubt sincerely devoted to the measure, because he believed profoundly in its national character. Local and national interests were so inseparable in his mind, that he could urge the improvement of the Illinois River as a truly national undertaking. "Through this channel, and this alone," he declared all aglow with enthusiasm, "we have a connected and uninterrupted navigation for steamboats and large vessels from the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico, to all the northern lakes." Considerations of war and defense, as well as of peace and commerce, counselled the proposed expenditure. "We have no fleet upon the lakes; we have no navy-yard there at which we could construct one, and no channel through which we could introduce our vessels from the sea-board. In times of war, those lakes must be defended, if defended at all, by a fleet from the naval depot and a yard on the Mississippi River." After the State of Illinois had expended millions on the Illinois and Michigan canal, was Congress to begrudge a few thousands to remove the sand-bars which impeded navigation in this "national highway by an irrevocable ordinance"?[175]