Just when the Nebraska issue came to the fore, he was maturing a scheme by which a fair, consistent, and continuous policy of internal improvements could be initiated, in place of the political bargaining which had hitherto determined the location of government operations.  Two days before he presented his famous Nebraska report, Douglas addressed a letter to Governor Matteson of Illinois in which he developed this new policy.[602] He believed that the whole question would be thoroughly aired in the session just begun.[603] Instead of making internal improvements a matter of politics, and of wasteful jobbery, he would take advantage of the constitutional provision which permits a State to lay tonnage duties by the consent of Congress.  If Congress would pass a law permitting the imposition of tonnage duties according to a uniform rule, then each town and city might be authorized to undertake the improvement of its own harbor, and to tax its own commerce for the prosecution of the work.  Under such a system the dangers of misuse and improper diversion of funds would be reduced to a minimum.  The system would be self-regulative.  Negligence, or extravagance, with the necessary imposition of higher duties, would punish a port by driving shipping elsewhere.

But for the interposition of the slavery issue, which no one would have more gladly banished from Congress, Douglas would have unquestionably pushed some such reform into the foreground.  His heart was bound up in the material progress of the country.  He could never understand why men should allow an issue like slavery to stand in the way of prudential and provident legislation for the expansion of the Republic.  He laid claim to no expert knowledge in other matters:  he frankly confessed his ignorance of the mysteries of tariff schedules.  “I have learned enough about the tariff,” said he with a sly thrust at his colleagues, who prided themselves on their wisdom, “to know that I know scarcely anything about it at all; and a man makes considerable progress on a question of this kind when he ascertains that fact."[604] Still, he grasped an elementary principle that had escaped many a protectionist, that “a tariff involves two conflicting principles which are eternally at war with each other.  Every tariff involves the principles of protection and of oppression, the principles of benefits and of burdens....  The great difficulty is, so to adjust these conflicting principles of benefits and burdens as to make one compensate for the other in the end, and give equal benefits and equal burdens to every class of the community."[605]

Douglas was wiser, too, than the children of light, when he insisted that works of art should be admitted free of duty.  “I wish we could get a model of every work of art, a cast of every piece of ancient statuary, a copy of every valuable painting and rare book, so that our artists might pursue their studies and exercise their skill at home, and that our literary men might not be exiled in the pursuits which bless mankind."[606]