But Douglas could not maintain this conciliatory attitude.  His sense of justice was too deeply outraged.  He recalled facts which every well-informed person knew.  “I know that men, high in authority and in the confidence of the territorial and National Government, canvassed every part of Kansas during the election of delegates, and each one of them pledged himself to the people that no snap judgment was to be taken.  Up to the time of the meeting of the convention, in October last, the pretense was kept up, the profession was openly made, and believed by me, and I thought believed by them, that the convention intended to submit a constitution to the people, and not to attempt to put a government in operation without such submission."[634] How was this pledge redeemed?  All men, forsooth, must vote for the constitution, whether they like it or not, in order to be permitted to vote for or against slavery!  This would be like an election under the First Consul, when, so his enemies averred, Napoleon addressed his troops with the words:  “Now, my soldiers, you are to go to the election and vote freely just as you please.  If you vote for Napoleon, all is well; vote against him, and you are to be instantly shot.”  That was a fair election!  “This election,” said Douglas with bitter irony, “is to be equally fair! All men in favor of the constitution may vote for it—­all men against it shall not vote at all!  Why not let them vote against it?  I have asked a very large number of the gentlemen who framed the constitution ... and I have received the same answer from every one of them....  They say if they allowed a negative vote the constitution would have been voted down by an overwhelming majority, and hence the fellows shall not be allowed to vote at all.”

“Will you force it on them against their will,” he demanded, “simply because they would have voted it down if you had consulted them?  If you will, are you going to force it upon them under the plea of leaving them perfectly free to form and regulate their domestic institutions in their own way?  Is that the mode in which I am called upon to carry out the principle of self-government and popular sovereignty in the Territories?” It is no answer, he argued, that the constitution is unobjectionable.  “You have no right to force an unexceptionable constitution on a people.”  The pro-slavery clause was not the offense in the constitution, to his mind.  “If Kansas wants a slave-State constitution she has a right to it, if she wants a free-State constitution she has a right to it.  It is none of my business which way the slavery clause is decided.  I care not whether it is voted up or down.”  The whole affair looked to him “like a system of trickery and jugglery to defeat the fair expression of the will of the people."[635]

The vehemence of his utterance had now carried Douglas perhaps farther than he had meant to go.[636] He paused to plead for a fair policy which would redeem party pledges: