These recommendations were for the most part carried out by legislation of the same year (1855), and, before his lamented death in December, 1855, Sir Charles Hotham had the happiness being able to report to the Home Government the almost perfect tranquillity of the gold-fields. Moreover, the revenue had not suffered by the substitution of the export duty for the license fees; but the collector of customs was of opinion that the result of the change had been to throw the entire burden of the tax upon the importers of the colony instead of upon the mining population. The Government was not, however, disposed to concern itself with considerations of abstract justice so long as it could collect a sufficient revenue without serious opposition. (1854) THE RISE OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY, Abraham Lincoln The election of 1852 virtually destroyed the Whig party, and Franklin Pierce, the candidate of the Democratic party, was elected by great majorities. If the Whig party had perished because it had no distinct position upon the one overshadowing question of the day, so neither did the new President comprehend the nature and condition of that issue. In his first message he complacently congratulated the country that the slavery question had been settled peacefully and forever by the compromise measures of 1850. He little knew how ineffective were those compromises; he never dreamed that it was a question that no compromise could settle permanently, and probably had no conception of the new force that was to be given to it during his own term of office. Stephen A. Douglas, an acknowledged aspirant to the Presidency, being Chairman of the Senate Committee on Territories, introduced and carried through Congress a measure called the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, which, in providing for the admission of those Territories as States, embodied his doctrine of "Popular Sovereignty" in that it permitted the inhabitants to determine by popular vote whether they should come into the Union as free States or as slave States, and abolished the Missouri Compromise, which for thirty-four years had forbidden the acquisition of any slave territory north of the parallel of 36° 30'.