such communities would form their own social and political
institutions, and so determine whether they would permit or forbid
slave-labor. By that rapid, and yet on the whole strangely
conservative, American process the people of the Territories would
become politically self-conscious and ready for statehood. Not all at
once, but gradually, a politically self-sufficient entity would come
into being. Such had been the history of American colonization; it
seemed the part of wise statesmanship to follow the trend of that
history.

Theoretically popular sovereignty, as applied in the Kansas-Nebraska
Act, was not an advance over the doctrine of Cass and Dickinson. It
professed to be the same which had governed Congress in organizing
Utah and New Mexico. Nevertheless, popular sovereignty had an
artificial quality which squatter sovereignty lacked. The relation
between Congress and the people of the Territories, in the matter of
slavery, was now to be determined not so much by actual conditions as
by an abstract principle. Federal policy was indoctrinated.

There was, too, this vital difference between squatter sovereignty in
Utah and New Mexico and popular sovereignty in Nebraska and Kansas:
the former were at least partially inhabited and enjoyed some degree
of social and political order; the latter were practically
uninhabited. It was one thing to grant control over all domestic
concerns to a population _in esse_, and another and quite different
thing to grant control to a people _in posse_. In the Kansas-Nebraska
Act hypothetical communities were endowed with the capacity of
self-government, and told to decide for themselves a question which
would become a burning issue the very moment that the first settlers
set foot in the Territories. Congress attempted thus to solve an