The dramatic contrast of these two began with their physical appearance.  Douglas was so small that he had been known to sit on a friend’s knee while arguing politics.  But his energy of mind, his indomitable force of character, made up for his tiny proportions.  “The Little Giant” was a term of endearment applied to him by his followers.  The mental contrast was equally marked.  Scarcely a quality in Lincoln that was not reversed in Douglas—­deliberation, gradualness, introspection, tenacity, were the characteristics of Lincoln’s mind.  The mind of Douglas was first of all facile.  He was extraordinarily quick.  In political Strategy he could sense a new situation, wheel to meet it, throw overboard well-established plans, devise new ones, all in the twinkle of an eye.  People who could not understand such rapidity of judgment pronounced him insincere, or at least, an opportunist.  That he did not have the deep inflexibility of Lincoln may be assumed; that his convictions, such as they were, did not have an ethical cast may be safely asserted.  Nevertheless, he was a great force, an immense human power, that did not change its course without good reason of its own sort.  Far more than a mere opportunist.  Politically, he summed up a change that was coming over the Democratic party.  Janus-like, he had two faces, one for his constituents, one for his colleagues.  To the voter he was still a Jeffersonian, with whom the old phraseology of the party, liberty, equality, and fraternity, were still the catch-words.  To his associates in the Senate he was essentially an aristocrat, laboring to advance interests that were careless of the rights of man.  A later age has accused the Senate of the United States of being the citadel of Big Business.  Waiving the latter view, the historian may assert that something suggestive of Big Business appeared in our politics in the ’fifties, and was promptly made at home in the Senate.  Perhaps its first definite manifestation was a new activity on the part of the great slave-holders.  To invoke again the classifications of later points of view, certain of our historians to-day think they can see in the ’fifties a virtual slavery trust, a combine of slave interests controlled by the magnates of the institution, and having as real, though informal, an existence as has the Steel Trust or the Beef Trust in our own time.  This powerful interest allied itself with the capitalists of the Northeast.  In modern phraseology, they aimed to “finance” the slave interest from New York.  And for a time the alliance succeeded in doing this.  The South went entirely upon credit.  It bought and borrowed heavily in the East New York furnished the money.