it therefore follow that it is a party measure?” ...  “I do not recognize the right of the President or his Cabinet ... to tell me my duty in the Senate Chamber.”  “Am I to be told that I must obey the Executive and betray my State, or else be branded as a traitor to the party, and hunted down by all the newspapers that share the patronage of the government, and every man who holds a petty office in any part of my State to have the question put to him, ’Are you Douglas’s enemy? if not, your head comes off.’” “I intend to perform my duty in accordance with my own convictions.  Neither the frowns of power nor the influence of patronage will change my action, or drive me from my principles.  I stand firmly, immovably upon those great principles of self-government and state sovereignty upon which the campaign was fought and the election won....  If, standing firmly by my principles, I shall be driven into private life, it is a fate that has no terrors for me.  I prefer private life, preserving my own self-respect and manhood, to abject and servile submission to executive will.  If the alternative be private life or servile obedience to executive will, I am prepared to retire.  Official position has no charms for me when deprived of that freedom of thought and action which becomes a gentleman and a senator.’"[659]

On the following day, the Senate passed the bill for the admission of Kansas under the Lecompton constitution, having rejected the amendment of Crittenden to submit that constitution to a vote of the people of Kansas.  A similar amendment, however, was carried in the House.  As neither chamber would recede from its position, a conference committee was appointed to break the deadlock.[660] It was from this committee, controlled by Lecomptonites, that the famous English bill emanated.  Stated briefly, the substance of this compromise measure—­for such it was intended to be—­was as follows:  Congress was to offer to Kansas a conditional grant of public lands; if this land ordinance should be accepted by a popular vote, Kansas was to be admitted to the Union with the Lecompton constitution by proclamation of the President; if it should be rejected, Kansas was not to be admitted until the Territory had a population equal to the unit of representation required for the House of Representatives.

Taken all in all, the bill was as great a concession as could be expected from the administration.  Not all were willing to say that the bill provided for a vote on the constitution, but Northern adherents could point to the vote on the land ordinance as an indirect vote upon the constitution.  It is not quite true to say that the land grant was a bribe to the voters of Kansas.  As a matter of fact, the amount of land granted was only equal to that usually offered to the Territories, and it was considerably less than the area specified in the Lecompton constitution.  Moreover, even if the land ordinance were defeated in order to reject the constitution, the Territory was pretty sure to secure as large a grant at some future time.  It was rather in the alternative held out, that the English bill was unsatisfactory to those who loved fair play.  Still, under the bill, the people of Kansas, by an act of self-denial, could defeat the Lecompton constitution.  To that extent, the supporters of the administration yielded to the importunities of the champion of popular sovereignty.