and the South, by leaning a little to the North, can unite with it, too; and our Southern friends ought to be able to bend and lean a little, as well as to require us to bend and lean all the time, in order to join them."

His practical instinct and his democratic inclinations were both apparent in the plan which he proposed in 1855 for the relief of the Supreme Court. A bill reported by the Committee on the Judiciary freed the justices from their duties on circuit and provided for eleven circuit judges. Douglas proposed, as a substitute, to divide the country into nine circuits, and to establish in each of these a court of appeals which should sit once a year and which should consist of one supreme court justice and the district judges of the circuit, the assignment of each justice to be changed from year to year. His aim was twofold: to relieve the Supreme Court by making the circuit courts the final resort in all cases below a certain importance, and to keep the justices in touch with the people, and familiar with the courts, the procedure, and the local laws in all parts of the country. The scheme, though different in details, is in its main features strikingly like the system of circuit court of appeals which was adopted in 1891.

But the questions, apart from that of slavery, on which Douglas's course has the most interest for a later generation were still questions of our foreign relations. On the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty, on the Treaty of Peace with Mexico, on the Oregon Boundary Treaty of 1853, on the negotiations for the purchase of Cuba, on the filibuster expeditions of 1858, and the controversy of that year over Great Britain's reassertion of the right of search—on all these questions he had very positive opinions and maintained them vigorously. In the year 1853, he went abroad, studied the workings of European systems, and made the acquaintance of various foreign statesmen; but he did not change his opinions or his temper of mind. In England, rather than put on court costume, he gave up an opportunity to be presented to the Queen; and in Russia he appears to have made good his contention that, as persons of other nationalities are presented to foreign rulers in the dress which they would wear before their own sovereigns, an American should be presented in such dress as he would wear before the President.

But if he maintained the traditional, old-fashioned American attitude toward "abroad," he was very sure, when he dealt with a particular case, to take a practical and modern line of reasoning. Opposing the treaty of peace with Mexico, he objected to the boundary line, to the promise we made never to acquire any more Mexican territory as we acquired Texas, and to the stipulations about the Indians. His objections were disregarded, and the treaty was ratified; but five years later the United States paid ten million dollars to get it altered in those respects. He vigorously opposed the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty in 1850, when it was ratified, and three years later, when the subject was brought up in open Senate, he stated at length his views on the whole subject of our relations with England and Central America, with Spain and Cuba, with European monarchies and Latin-American states. Whether right or wrong, they are the views on which the American people have acted as practical occasions have arisen and bid fair to act in the future.

It would have been possible, he thought, but for Clayton's mismanagement, to get from Nicaragua a grant to the United States of exclusive and perpetual control over all railroad and canal routes through that country from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Instead, we had pledged ourselves to England "not to do, in all coming time, that which, in the progress of events, our interests, duty, and even safety may compel us to do." He opposed the treaty because it invited European intervention in American affairs; because it denied us the right to fortify any canal that might be built; because its language was equivocal in regard to the British protectorate over the Mosquito coast, and otherwise clearly contrary to the Monroe Doctrine; and because we made an unnecessary promise never to occupy any part of Central America. To all these objections, save the last, time has added force; and the principle of the last is now established in our national policy. That principle Douglas proclaimed so often that it almost rivals the principle of popular sovereignty itself in the matter of the frequency of its appearance in his speeches. "You may make," he declared, "as many treaties as you please to fetter the limbs of this giant Republic, and she will burst them all from her, and her course will be onward to a limit which I will not venture to prescribe." The Alleghanies had not withheld us from the basin of the Mississippi, nor the Mississippi from the plains, nor the Rocky Mountains from the Pacific coast. Now that the Pacific barred our way to the westward, who could say that we might not turn, or ought not to turn, northward or southward? Later, he came to contemplate a time when the Pacific might cease to be a barrier: when our "interests, duty, and even safety" might impel us onward to the islands of the sea. He would make no pledges for the future. Agreements not to annex territory might be reasonable in treaties between European powers, but they were contrary to the spirit of American civilization. "Europe," he said, "is antiquated, decrepit, tottering on the verge of dissolution. When you visit her, the objects which excite your admiration are the relics of past greatness: the broken columns erected to departed power. Here everything is fresh, blooming, expanding, and advancing. We wish a wise, practical policy adapted to our condition and position."

A more ardent and thoroughgoing expansionist is not to be found among eminent Americans of that time, or even of later times. While he was denouncing General Walker's lawless invasion of Central America in 1858, he took pains to make it plain that it was the filibusters' method, and not their object, which he condemned. In fact, he condemned their method chiefly because its tendency was to defeat their object.

He believed that England, notwithstanding the kinship of the two peoples and the similarity of their civilizations, was our rival by necessity, our ill-wisher because of the past. The idea that we were bound to the mother country by ties of gratitude or affection he always combated. He denied her motherhood as a historical proposition, and demanded to know of Senator Butler, of South Carolina, who was moved to eloquence over America's debt to England for a language and a literature, whether he was duly grateful also for English criticism of our institutions, and particularly for the publications of English abolitionists. As to the British claim of a right to search American vessels for slaves, he was for bringing the matter at once to an issue; for denying the right in toto; and if Great Britain chose to treat our resistance as a cause of war, he would be for prolonging the war until the British flag should disappear forever from the American continent and the adjacent islands.