Replying to the attacks which this report evoked, Douglas took still higher ground.  He was ready to affirm that Congress had no power to district the States.  To concede to Congress so great a power was to deny those reserved rights of the States, without which their sovereignty would be an empty title.  “Congress may alter, but it cannot supersede these regulations [of the States] till it supplies others in their places, so as to leave the right of representation perfect."[173]

The argument of the report was bold and ingenious, if not convincing.  The minority were ready to admit that the case had been cleverly stated, although hardly a man doubted that political considerations had weighed most heavily with the chairman of the committee.  Douglas resented the suggestion with such warmth, however, that it is charitable to suppose he was not conscious of the bias under which he had labored.

Upon one auditor, who to be sure was inexpressibly bored by the whole discussion of the “everlasting general ticket elections,” Douglas made an unhappy impression.  John Quincy Adams recorded in his diary,—­that diary which was becoming a sort of Rogues’ Gallery:  “He now raved out his hour in abusive invectives upon the members who had pointed out its slanders and upon the Whig party.  His face was convulsed, his gesticulation frantic, and he lashed himself into such a heat that if his body had been made of combustible matter, it would have burnt out.  In the midst of his roaring, to save himself from choking, he stripped off and cast away his cravat, and unbuttoned his waist-coat, and had the air and aspect of a half-naked pugilist.  And this man comes from a judicial bench, and passes for an eloquent orator."[174]

No one will mistake this for an impartial description.  Nearly every Democrat who spoke upon this tedious question, according to Adams, either “raved” or “foamed at the mouth.”  The old gentleman was too wearied and disgusted with the affair to be a fair reporter.  But as a caricature, this picture of the young man from Illinois certainly hits off the style which he affected, in common with most Western orators.

Notwithstanding his very substantial services to his party, Douglas had sooner or later to face his constituents with an answer to the crucial question, “What have you done for us?” It is a hard, brutal question, which has blighted many a promising career in American politics.  The interest which Douglas exhibited in the Western Harbors bill was due, in part at least, to his desire to propitiate those by virtue of whose suffrages he was a member of the House of Representatives.  At the same time, he was no doubt sincerely devoted to the measure, because he believed profoundly in its national character.  Local and national interests were so inseparable in his mind, that he could urge the improvement of the Illinois River as a truly national undertaking.  “Through this channel, and this alone,”