According to the American usage, he was "Judge Douglas" all the rest of his life, but the state bench no more satisfied his ambition than the other state offices he had held. In December, 1842, when the legislature proceeded to ballot for a United States senator, his name was presented, though again his age fell short of the legal requirement, and on the last ballot he had fifty-one votes against the fifty-six which elected his successful competitor. The next year, being nominated for the lower house of Congress, he accepted, and at once resigned his place on the bench, though the district had a Whig complexion. At the end of a canvass which left both himself and his opponent, Browning, seriously ill, he was elected by a majority of several hundred. On his way to Washington, he visited Cleveland, where his westward journey had come so near an abortive ending, and then his home-folk at Canandaigua. He was but thirty years old, yet he had held five important political offices, he had risen to high rank in his profession, he was the leader of the dominant party in a great State; and all this he had done alone, unaided. Few aged men have brought back such laurels from their Western fortune-seeking. In December, 1843, he took his seat in the House of Representatives and began to display before the whole country the same brilliant spectacle of daring, energy, and success which had captivated the people of Illinois. CHAPTER II THE HOUSE AND THE SENATE It was the aggressive energy of the man, unrestrained by such formality as was still observed by the public men of the older Eastern communities, which most impressed those who have left on record their judgments of the young Western congressman. The aged Adams, doubtless the best representative of the older school in either branch of Congress, gave a page of his diary to one of Douglas's early speeches. "His face was convulsed,"--so the merciless diary runs,--"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 and cast away his cravat, unbuttoned his waistcoat, 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!" On another occasion, the same critic tells us, Douglas "raved an hour about democracy and anglophobia and universal empire." Adams had been professor of rhetoric and oratory at Harvard College, and he was the last man in the country to appreciate an oratorical manner that departed from the established rules and traditions of the art. Ampere, a French traveler, thought Douglas a perfect representative of the energetic builders of the Western commonwealths, and predicted that he would come into power when it should be the turn of the West to dominate the country. "Small, black, stocky," so this observer described him, "his speech is full of nervous