To Douglas the situation in which this left his party was disastrous. Restlessly active and efficient as he had been in the practical management of political affairs, his distinctive achievement had been the powerful advocacy of the doctrine of popular sovereignty, of which, if not the original author, he was at least the chief sponsor. With this doctrine his fame as a statesman was indissolubly linked. On its success the unity of the Northern wing of his party depended; on which hung his hopes of victory. Two days before the opinion was announced President Buchanan in his inaugural address reminded the people that the great question which had agitated them so long would soon be settled by the Supreme court and bespoke general acquiescence in its decision. This unhappy allusion gave rise to the unpleasant suspicion that the relation between the new President and the Supreme Court in their common service of the South was unduly intimate. Had Douglas been great enough to sink the politician in the statesman, he would now have broken with the Southern wing of his party, which had contemptuously repudiated his entire system of political doctrines; he would have rejected the new dogma imposed upon his party by the Southern dictators and led the assault upon this new creed, which was not only fatal to himself as a National statesman, but could not fail ultimately to prove fatal to his party and involve his country in the horrors of civil war. His squatter sovereignty was pitiful enough. But this new doctrine, announced by the Supreme Court, and approved by the President and his party, stripped the settlers in the Territories of all semblance of sovereignty and planted slavery among them by the self-acting energy of the Constitution, in utter disregard of their wishes. On the most important question then pending his party had reached a conclusion which he believed to be utterly wrong. But it was his opinion that moral ideas had no place in politics. He could not break with the powerful party which he had led so long. He could not unqualifiedly endorse the new doctrine without stultifying himself. He attempted the impossible task of reconciling the new creed with that which he had preached in the past.