The Life of Stephen A. Douglas | Page 7

political issues of the ante-diluvians. Douglas was elected by a
small majority.
He was in Washington at the opening of Congress and entered upon his
eventful and brilliant career on that elevated theatre, though he was as
yet only the crude material out of which a statesman might be evolved.
He was a vigorous, pushing Western politician, with half developed
faculties and vague, unlimited ambition, whose early congressional
service gave small promise of the great leader of after years.
The famous description of him contained in the Adams diary relates to
this period of his life. The venerable ex-President, then a Member of
the House, mentions him as the homunculus Douglas and with acrid
malevolence describes him as raving out his hour in abusive invectives,
his face convulsed, his gesticulation frantic, and lashing himself into
such heat that if his body had been made of combustible matter it
would have burned out.
"In the midst of his roaring," he declares, "to save himself from
choking, he stripped off and cast away his cravat, unbuttoned his
waistcoat and had the air and aspect of a half-naked pugilist." With all
its extravagance and exaggeration, it is impossible to doubt the
substantial truth of this charicature. Adams did not live to see the
young Member become the most powerful debater, the most
accomplished political leader and most influential statesman of the
great and stirring period that ensued.

The time was strange, as difficult of comprehension to the generation
that has grown up since the War as the England of Hengist and Horsa is
to the modern Cockney, or the Rome of Tiberius to the present
inhabitant of the Palentine Hill. Only sixty years have passed, but with
them has passed away civilization, with its modes of thought and
sentiment, its ethics and its politics. The country had but one fifth of its
present population. A third of our area was still held by Mexico.
Wealth was as yet the poet's dream or the philosopher's night-mare.
Commerce was a subordinate factor in our civilization. Agriculture was
the occupation of the people and the source of wealth. Cotton was king
not only in the field of business, but in that of politics. The world still
maintained its attitude of patronizing condescension or haughty
contempt toward the dubious experiment of "broad and rampant
democracy." Dickens had just written his shallow twaddle about
Yankee crudeness and folly. Macaulay was soon to tell us that our
Constitution was "all sail and no anchor." DeTocqueville had but
recently published his appreciative estimate of the New World
civilization. Americans knew they had less admiration than they
claimed and had lurking doubts that there was some ground for the
ill-concealed contempt of the Old World toward the swaggering giant
of the New, and a fixed resolve to proclaim their supreme greatness
with an energy and persistence that would drown the sneers of all
Europe. It was a time of egotism, bluster and brag in our relation to the
foreign world, and of truckling submission in our home politics to a
dominant power, long since so completely whirled away by the storm
of revolution, that it is hard to realize that half a century ago the
strongest bowed to its will.
Douglas was in no sense a reformer or the preacher of a crusade. He
was ready to cheerfully accept the ethics of the time without criticism
or question. Political morality was at its nadir. The dominant power of
slavery was not alone responsible for this depravity. The country was
isolated from the world and little influenced by foreign thought. Its
energies were devoted to material aggrandizement, to the conquest of
Nature on a gigantic scale, to the acquisition of wealth. Since the
settlement of the Constitution moral problems had dropped out of
political life and the great passions of the heroic age had died away.
Education was superficial. Religion was emotional and spasmodic.

Business ethics was low.
Party politics was in a chaotic condition. The Whig organization was
not in any proper sense a party at all. It was an ill-assorted aggregation
of political elements, without common opinions or united purposes,
whose only proper function was opposition. It was so utterly incoherent,
its convictions so vague and negative, that it was unable even to draft a
platform. Without any formal declaration of principles or purposes it
had nominated and elected Harrison and Tyler, one a distinguished
soldier and respectable Western politician, the other a renegade
Virginia Democrat, whose Whiggism consisted solely of a temporary
quarrel with his own party. The one unanimous opinion of the party
was that it was better for themselves, if not for the country, that the
Whigs should hold the offices. The Democrats had been in control of
the Government for forty years. Their professed principles were still
broadly