John Wyatt. This country is richer for having attracted Douglas to it.
He is here to stay. And he will be one of the great men of the country
as President Jackson is now the greatest figure since Washington; and
Illinois will send him forth as her son to speak and to act on the great
questions that are already beginning to fill the minds of the people."

Douglas often came out to stay for the night or for a day or two. He had
little law business, but his energies were always employed in shaping
his powers toward a participation in the politics of the country. His
superhuman energy was intensified by the fact that he had been deprived
of an opportunity to educate himself. It was the gadfly that drove him
forward with such restless industry. I could see that he had no patience
for a detailed study of the law; that he might be ignorant of the
technical steps to be taken in the collection of a promissory note, but
he would know something about the resources of a treaty; that if he did
not know how to settle the title to a farmer's field, he had considered
ways to put at rest any claim of England to the territory of the Oregon.
Yet he had to live as a lawyer before he could flourish as a statesman.
And he had become the prosecuting attorney. His enemies said it was by a
trick; that he had had the state law changed so that the legislature
could appoint him state's attorney for the district of Jacksonville. The
accusation proved too much. Douglas was not quite twenty-two when he
reached this office. He had been in the state but two years, not quite
that. How had such a youth first won the confidence of enough people who
wished to give him this office and were able to do it; and then won the
legislature to do the extraordinary thing of changing the law to give
him the office, while at the same time supplanting a seasoned and
experienced man in the place? How? Was every one corrupt, people and
legislature? But it was February and he was the prosecuting attorney for
the people.