Stephen A. Douglas, of Illinois, was but 37 years of age when he stood in the United States Senate, one of the ablest of the supporters of the compromise of 1850. His own hand had drawn the bills to admit California as a Free State, and to organize Utah and New Mexico. Among the venerable princes of the Senate, he was their equal, and Henry Clay, the noblest Roman of them all, moved by Mr. Douglas' magnanimity on that occasion, pronounced him to be "the most generous man living." In 1854 Mr. Douglas carried through the Congress of the United States and through a parliamentary warfare, in which no other man than he could have triumphed, the bill to organize the territories of Kansas and Nebraska, declaring inoperative and void the Missouri geographical compromise line, and affirming the true intent and meaning of the Kansas and Nebraska act to be, "_to leave the people of any State or territory perfectly free to form and regulate their domestic institutions in their own way, subject only to the Constitution of the United States_." In this short "_stump speech in the belly of the bill_," as Thomas H. Benton and Republican orators after him have, by way of ridicule, been pleased to call it, is the key to the law which must ever govern its true interpretation, and it puts to the rout all the arguments that have been made to prove that non-intervention and popular or territorial sovereignty are not in the Kansas and Nebraska bill, except in small fractions. A measure so radical and far-reaching as the formal annulling of the Missouri compromise line, could not fail to meet at first with terrific opposition. It broke in on old habits and ways of thinking--it stirred up men's opinions to the roots--it took thought from the surface and forms of things to their substance--it brought democracy to the test. It put to the nation the pregnant questions: Are the rights of white men and black men, the claims of freedom and humanity to be trusted to the white men of the American territories, as well as American States, or are they not? Are free white American citizens in American territories, as well as American States, competent to decide the question of African slavery or not? Are they competent to govern themselves or not? It did more than this; it laid the ax of Anglo-Saxon democracy at the root of the tree of African slavery. No man was more sincerely opposed to the annulling of the Missouri compromise line than myself; but I am free to say, that with my prejudices in favor of freedom and Free States, and the reputed sacredness of the Missouri line, I did not look on both sides of the question. I condemned Mr. Douglas and I condemned him unheard. I have endeavored to retrieve that error by a more thorough examination, and I am now convinced that he was in the right and his opponents were in the wrong, and to that conviction will the nation come at last.