In these readings too I was following with great care the career of Douglas in Congress, in which Abigail and Aldington were not so warmly interested.  Douglas’ early life, his adventure into the West, had put him through an experience and into the possession of an understanding which were alien to the eastern statesmen.  The West was for the enterprise of the young.  It was a domain of opportunity for youth, divorced from family influence and the tangles of decaying environment.  Hence Texas must be assimilated, and California taken eventually, and the Oregon country acquired.  An ocean-bound republic!

As for slavery, it did not enter into Douglas’ calculations.  I knew, however, that in spite of what any one said, he was not a protagonist of slavery.  He simply subordinated it to the interests of expansion.  He was willing to leave it to the new states to determine for themselves whether they should have slavery or not.  With the impetuosity of his thirty-two years he slipped into a recognition of the Missouri Compromise, and was willing that slavery should be prohibited north of this line.  He was generating a plague for himself which would come back upon him later.

But if Douglas’ advocacy of the Texas expansion exposed him to charges of a slave adherency, nothing could be said against his cry for the taking of Oregon.  The Mormons whom he had befriended without any dishonor to himself had set forth into the untraveled land of Utah.  Already a band of young men from Peoria had gone into the Far West.  Therefore, when he now spoke for Oregon he had a responsive ear among his own people in Illinois.  If the eastern people, the dwellers in the old communities, did not kindle to Oregon, it was because they had neither the flare nor did they see the urge of this emigration and occupancy.  With the rapid extension of railroads, how soon would the whole vast land be bound together in quick communication!

So it was, Douglas was offering bills in Congress for creating the territory of Nebraska, for establishing military posts in Oregon, and for extending settlements across the West under military protection.  He advocated means of communication across the Rocky Mountains.  He thought of his own unprotected youth.  He would have the young men from Peoria and from every place feel confident in the knowledge that as builders of the nation’s greatness they had the friendship and the strong arm of the government around them.

What was Great Britain doing?  Reaching for California, hungering for Texas, eyeing Cuba.  She hated republican institutions.  She would gird them with her own monarchist principles, bodied forth in fortifications and military posts.  It should not be.  Douglas had said:  “I would blot out the lines of the map which now mark our national boundaries on this continent and make the area of liberty as broad as the continent itself.  I would not suffer petty rival republics to grow up here, engendering jealousy of each other, and interfering with each other’s domestic affairs, and continually endangering their peace.  I do not wish to go beyond the great ocean—­beyond those boundaries which the God of nature has marked out.  I would limit myself only by that boundary which is so clearly defined by nature.”