The whole doctrine of popular sovereignty which became thenceforth the central article in his creed did such violence both to law and philosophy as to discredit the acumen of any statesman who seriously believed it. It was a short lived doctrine, speedily repudiated with disgust by the South, in whose interest it had been invented, and rejected as a legal heresy by a Supreme Court of learned advocates of slavery. It is hardly possible that Douglas believed that Congress could delegate its highest duties and responsibilities to a handful of chance squatters on the frontier. This doctrine, to the establishment of which he devoted a great part of the remaining energies of his life, "meant that Congress, which represented the political wisdom of an educated people, should abdicate its constitutional right of deciding a question which demanded the most sagacious statesmanship in favor of a thousand, or perhaps ten thousand, pioneers, adventurers and fortune seekers, who should happen to locate in the Territory." The proposition to give the squatters actual sovereignty in all things was an evident reducto ad absurdium. And yet it was the inevitable result of Douglas' reasoning. The only excuse for the existence of territorial governments was that the inhabitants were not yet ready for the duties of self-government. Squatter sovereignty rested on the assumption that there was no such period of immaturity, and hence no period in which territorial governments were justified. The clear logic of the doctrine would entitle the first band of squatters on the public domain to organize a State. But it was a superficially plausible proposition that appealed with peculiar power to the uncritical popular prejudice. The equality of men and the right of self government were the central truths of the American polity. The sentimental devotion to these two principles was passionate and universal. A dogma that seemed to embody them was a rare invention, the supreme feat of the highest order of practical political genius. But the omens were not good. People seemed absurdly in earnest about this harmless political maneuver. Throughout the North rose a storm of vehement protest, not merely from Abolitionists and Whigs but from insurgent Democrats, which resulted in the consolidation of the incoherent anti-slavery factions into the Republican party and its early conquest of the Democratic States of the Northwest. It developed later that the Northern Democracy was hopelessly ruined by this political masterpiece of the greatest Northern Democrat.