There is an aspect of this episode, however, which lifts it above a mere log-rolling device to secure an appropriation.  Here and there it fired the imagination of men.  There is abundant reason to believe that the senior Senator from Illinois was not so sordid in his bargaining for votes as he seemed.  Above and apart from the commercial welfare of the Lake Region, the Mississippi Valley, and the Gulf Plains, there was an end subserved, which lay in the background of his consciousness and which came to expression rarely if ever.  Practical men may see visions and dream dreams which they are reluctant to voice.  There was genuine emotion beneath the materialism of Senator Walker’s remarks (and he was reared in Illinois), when he said:  “Anything that improves the connection between the North and the South is a great enterprise.  To cross parallels of latitude, to enable the man of commerce to make up his assorted cargo, is infinitely more important than anything you can propose within the same parallels of latitude.  I look upon it as a great chain to unite North and South."[342] Senator Shields of Illinois only voiced the inmost thought of Douglas, when he exclaimed, “The measure is too grand, too magnificent a one to meet with such a fate at the hands of Congress.  And really, as it is to connect the North and South so thoroughly, it may serve to get rid of even the Wilmot Proviso, and tie us together so effectually that the idea of separation will be impossible."[343]

The settlement of the West had followed parallels of latitude.  The men of the Lake Plains were transplanted New Englanders, New Yorkers, Pennsylvanians; the men of the Gulf Plains came from south of Mason and Dixon’s line,—­pioneers both, aggressive, bold in initiative, but alienated by circumstances of tremendous economic significance.  If ever North should be arrayed against South, the makeweight in the balance would be these pioneers of the Northwest and Southwest.  It was no mean conception to plan for the “man of commerce” who would cross from one region to the other, with his “assorted cargo,"[344] for in that cargo were the destinies of two sections and his greatest commerce was to consist in the exchange of imponderable ideas.  The ideal which inspired Douglas never found nobler expression, than in these words with which he replied to Webster’s slighting reference to the West: 

“There is a power in this nation greater than either the North or the South—­a growing, increasing, swelling power, that will be able to speak the law to this nation, and to execute the law as spoken.  That power is the country known as the great West—­the Valley of the Mississippi, one and indivisible from the gulf to the great lakes, and stretching, on the one side and the other, to the extreme sources of the Ohio and Missouri—­from the Alleghanies to the Rocky mountains.  There, Sir, is the hope of this nation—­the resting place of the power that is not only to control, but to save, the