The reception was recognized by the politicians of both parties as a great success. It was a brilliant opening of the senatorial campaign. The Republicans were anxious to counteract it. On the following evening Lincoln spoke at the same place. He had a large and enthusiastic audience. But he was not an impromptu orator at all comparable to Douglas. While his carefully prepared Springfield speech was decidedly better than Douglas' dashing address in Chicago, his unprepared speech was by no means equal to it. The marked disparity between the two speeches must have intensified the suspicion among Lincoln's friends that he was no match for his rival on the stump. On the 16th of July Douglas again spoke to a vast multitude at Bloomington. He made an artful appeal for the Whig vote by a well turned compliment to "Kentucky's great and gallant statesman, John J. Crittenden," who proposed to refer the whole question back to the people of Kansas and thus "showed himself a worthy successor of the immortal Clay." The Republicans had "endorsed the great principle of the Kansas-Nebraska bill," they had "come to the Douglas platform in supporting the Crittenden-Montgomery bill." The compromise of 1850 embodied the principle that every people ought to have the privilege of forming and regulating their own institutions to suit themselves. Each State had that right and no reason existed why it should not be extended to the Territories. The Illinois House of Representatives by an almost unanimous vote had asserted that the principle embodied in the measures of 1850 was the birth-right of free men, the gift of heaven, a principle vindicated by our Revolutionary fathers, that no limitation should ever be placed upon it either in the organization of a territorial government or the admission of a State into the Union. In conformity with that principle he had brought in the Kansas-Nebraska bill, for which Lincoln and his friends were seeking his defeat. "I have known Lincoln well," he said, "for a quarter of a century. I have known him as you all know him, a kind-hearted, amiable gentleman, a right good fellow, a worthy citizen, of eminent ability as a lawyer, and, I have no doubt, sufficient ability to make a good Senator." He examined Lincoln's "house divided-against-itself" philosophy, pointing out that the house had been divided for nearly seventy years and still stood.