The assembly of which Douglas was now a member had gradually risen to a higher place in our system than the founders intended. The House, partly by reason of its exclusive right to originate measures of a certain class, partly because it was felt to be more accurately representative of the people, had at first a sort of ascendency. The great constructive measures of the first administration were House measures. Even so late as Jefferson's and Madison's administrations, one must look oftenest to the records of that chamber for the main lines of legislative history. But in Jackson's time the Senate profited by its comparative immunity from sudden political changes, by its veto on appointments, and by the greater freedom of debate which its limited membership permitted. It came to stand, as the House could not, for conservatism, for deliberation, for independence of the executive. The advantage thus gained was increased as the growth of the Speaker's power into a virtual premiership and the development of the committee system undermined the importance of the individual representative, and as the more rapid increase of population in the free States destroyed in the House that balance of the sections which in the Senate was still carefully maintained. Moreover, the country no longer sent its strongest men into the White House, and the Supreme Court was no longer favorable to that theory of the government which, as Marshall expounded it, had tended so markedly to elevate the court itself. The upper house had gained not merely as against the lower, but as against the executive and the judiciary. The ablest and most experienced statesmen were apt to be senators; and the Senate was the true battleground in a contest that was beginning to dwarf all others. From the beginning to the end of Douglas's service there, saving a brief, delusive interval after the Compromise of 1850, the slavery question in its territorial phase was constantly uppermost, and in the Senate, if anywhere, those measures must be devised, those compromises agreed on, which should save the country from disunion or war. There was open to him, therefore, a path to eminence which, difficult as it might prove, was at least a plain one. To win among his fellows in the Senate a leadership such as he had readily won among his fellows at school, at Jacksonville, at Springfield, in the legislature and the Democratic organization of Illinois, and such as he was rising to in the lower house when he left it, and then to find and establish the right policy with slavery, and particularly with slavery in the Territories--there lay his path. It was a task that demanded the highest powers, a public service adequate to the loftiest patriotism. How he did, in fact, attempt it, how nearly he succeeded in it, and why he failed in it, are the inquiries with which any study of his life must be chiefly concerned.