The educative value of his new office was no small consideration to the young lawyer.  He not only kept the records and plans of surveys within his district, but put up each tract at auction, in accordance with the proclamation of the President, and issued certificates of sale to all purchasers, describing the land purchased.  The duties were not onerous, but they required considerable familiarity with land laws and with the practical difficulties arising from imperfect surveys, pre-emption rights, and conflicting claims.[73] Daily contact with the practical aspects of the public land policy of the country, seems to have opened his eyes to the significance of the public domain as a national asset.  With all his realism, Douglas was gifted with a certain sort of imagination in things political.  He not only saw what was obvious to the dullest clerk,—­the revenue derived from land sales,—­but also those intangible and prospective gains which would accrue to State and nation from the occupation and cultivation of the national domain.  He came to believe that, even if not a penny came into the treasury, the government would still be richer from having parcelled out the great uninhabited wastes in the West.  Beneath the soiled and uncomely exterior of the Western pioneer, native or foreigner, Douglas discerned not only a future tax-bearer, but the founder of Commonwealths.

Only isolated bits of tradition throw light upon the daily life of the young Register of the Land Office.  All point to the fact that politics was his absorbing interest.  He had no avocations; he had no private life, no esoteric tastes which invite a prying curiosity; he had no subtle aspects of character and temperament which sometimes make even commonplace lives dramatic.  His life was lived in the open.  Lodging at the American Tavern, he was always seen in company with other men.  Diller’s drug-store, near the old market, was a familiar rendezvous for him and his boon companions.  Just as he had no strong interests which were not political, so his intimates were likely to be his political confreres.  He had no literary tastes:  if he read at all, he read law or politics.[74] Yet while these characteristics suggest narrowness, they were perhaps the inevitable outcome of a society possessing few cultural resources and refinements, but tremendous directness of purpose.

One of the haunts of Douglas in these Springfield days was the office of the Republican, a Democratic journal then edited by the Webers.  There he picked up items of political gossip and chatted with the chance comer, or with habitues like himself.  He was a welcome visitor, just the man whom a country editor, mauling over hackneyed matter, likes to have stimulate his flagging wits with a jest or a racy anecdote.  Now and then Douglas would take up a pen good-naturedly, and scratch off an editorial which would set Springfield politicians by the ears.  The tone of the Republican, as indeed of the Western press generally at this time, was low.  Editors of rival newspapers heaped abuse upon each other, without much regard to either truth or decency.  Feuds were the inevitable product of these editorial amenities.