As his proposal was rejected it is not worth while now to speculate upon what effect its acceptance might have had. In lieu of it the compromise measures of 1850 were enacted. Their effect was almost immediately to increase and intensify an inflammation of the popular mind which it is difficult in our time even to conceive. Senator Douglas voted for these measures and advocated them strongly in the Senate. When he returned to his own state at the end of the session he found himself an object of public hatred and condemnation. The City Council of Chicago greeted his coming with a set of resolutions in denunciation of him. The resolutions declared him to be a traitor and pronounced the compromise measures a violation of the law of God. The City Council instructed the police, and advised all citizens to disregard the new laws. A mass meeting was called and by resolution it declared it to be the duty of all good citizens "to defy death, the dungeon and the grave" in resisting the Fugitive Slave Law, but so uncertain was the popular mind, even in its fury, that Douglas promptly challenged it and met it in a great mass meeting before which he delivered an impassioned speech explaining his views. By this single speech he secured an immediate and well-nigh unanimous rescinding of the resolutions of censure and a little later he was again elected to represent the state in the Senate. Three years later, in 1853, on his return from Washington to Illinois and after he had made himself sponsor for that Kansas-Nebraska Bill of which an account will presently be given, he picturesquely said that he had traveled all the way from Washington to Chicago "by the light of his own burning effigies." Nevertheless when his term expired a few years later he was again elected to the Senate after a conspicuous canvass of the state in which his reëlection was practically the only question at issue and in which Abraham Lincoln was his opponent on the stump. It must not be supposed that Northern sentiment on the questions then dividing the country was uniform. It was on the contrary as sharply divided as ever, with a distinct preponderance of it in favor of letting the slavery question rest, so far as legislation was concerned, where it had been placed by the compromise measures of 1850. But the sentiment in antagonism to slavery was everywhere growing even among those who deprecated the agitation of the subject.