But if he had taken a wrong course he did not fail to do that which will often force us, in spite of ourselves, into admiration for a man in the wrong: he pursued it unwavering to the end. Neither the swelling uproar from without nor a resolute and conspicuously able opposition within the Senate daunted him for a moment. He pressed the bill to its passage with furious energy. He set upon Chase savagely, charging him with bad faith in that he had gained time, by a false pretense of ignorance of the bill, to flood the country with slanderous attacks upon it and upon its author. The audacity of the announcement that the Compromise of 1850 repealed the Compromise of 1820 was well-nigh justified by the skill of his contention. It was a principle, he maintained, and no mere temporary expedient, for which Clay and Webster had striven, which both parties had indorsed, which the country had acquiesced in,--the principle of "popular sovereignty." That principle lay at the base of our institutions; it was illustrated in all the achievements of our past; it, and it alone, would enable us in safety to go on and extend our institutions into new regions. Cass, though he made difficulties about details, supported the bill, and the Southerners played their part well. But Douglas afterwards said, and truly: "I passed the Kansas-Nebraska act myself. I had the authority and power of a dictator throughout the whole controversy in both houses. The speeches were nothing. It was the marshaling and directing of men and guarding from attacks and with ceaseless vigilance preventing surprise." Chase was the true leader of the opposition, and he was equipped with a most thorough mastery of the slavery question in its historical and constitutional aspects. By shrewd amendments he sought to bring out the division between the Northern and Southern supporters of the bill; for the Southerners held that slave-owners had a constitutional right to go into any Territory with their property,--a right with which neither Congress nor a territorial legislature could interfere. Douglas, however, managed to avoid the danger. He made another change in the important clause. To please Cass and others, he made it declare that the Compromise of 1820 was "inconsistent with" instead of "superseded by" the principles of the later compromise; and then he added the words, "it being the true intent and meaning of this act not to legislate slavery into any Territory or State, nor to exclude it therefrom, but to leave the inhabitants thereof perfectly free to form and regulate their domestic institutions in their own way, subject only to the Constitution of the United States." That, as Benton said, was a little stump speech incorporated in the bill; and it proved a very effective stump speech indeed.