It is impossible not to admire Douglas's courage in that trying ordeal. He found the hall filled with his opponents, yet he began by saying, "My fellow citizens, I appear before you to vindicate the Kansas-Nebraska Bill." The words evoked a perfect tumult, which continued for half an hour. He appealed to their sense of fair play and honour, but they asked him whether he had played fair with liberty in Washington. Growing angry, he tried to denounce them as cowards, afraid to listen to a discussion, and they answered that it was cowardly to desert a slave who needed a defender. At eleven o'clock he flung his arms in the air and dared them to shoot, because a man had waved a pistol. The crowd answered with a shower of eggs, while a man shouted that bullets were too valuable to be wasted on traitors. At twelve o'clock the bells rang out the midnight. Douglas pulled out his watch and shouted, "It is midnight. I am going home and to church, and you may go to Hades!" Douglas met a mob in Chicago, just as Beecher met a mob in England. But Beecher conquered his mob in Manchester; the mob in Chicago conquered Douglas. Beecher won, because he was right and the mob was wrong; Douglas lost, because he was wrong and the mob was right. "You can fool all of the people some of the time, and you can fool some of the people all the time; you cannot fool all of the people all of the time" on the great principles of liberty. Douglas's Kansas-Nebraska Bill brought on an era of civil war in Kansas, sent the guerrillas over the Sunflower State, burned Lawrence, destroyed the State government and filled the whole land with tumult and bitterness. And it cost Douglas his fame and place among the great men of the Republic.