It
Seemed To Me That It Would Be Very Possible In A Dishonest
Legislator To Vote Twice On Any Subject Of Great Interest; But It
May Perhaps Be The Case That There Are No Dishonest Legislators In
The House Of Representatives.
According to a list which I obtained, the present number of members
is 173, and there are 63 vacancies occasioned by secession.
New
York returns 33 members; Pennsylvania, 25; Ohio, 21; Virginia, 13;
Massachusetts and Indiana, 11; Tennessee and Kentucky, 10; South
Carolina, 6; and so on, till Delaware, Kansas, and Florida return
only 1 each. When the Constitution was framed, Pennsylvania
returned 8, and New York only 6; whereas Virginia returned 10, and
South Carolina 5, From which may be gathered the relative rate of
increase in population of the free-soil States and the slave States.
All these States return two Senators each to the other House - Kansas
sending as many as New York. The work in the House begins at twelve
noon, and is not often carried on late into the evening. Indeed,
this, I think, is never done till toward the end of the session.
The Senate house is in the opposite wing of the building, the
position of the one house answering exactly to that of the other.
It is somewhat smaller, but is, as a matter of course, much less
crowded. There are 34 States, and, therefore, 68 seats and 68 desks
only are required. These also are arranged in a horseshoe form, and
face the President; but there was a sad array of empty chairs when I
was in Washington, nineteen or twenty seats being vacant in
consequence of secession. In this house the Vice-President of the
United States acts as President, but has by no means so hard a job
of work as his brother on the other side of the way. Mr. Hannibal
Hamlin, from Maine, now fills this chair. I was driven, while in
Washington, to observe something amounting almost to a peculiarity
in the Christian names of the gentlemen who were then administrating
the government of the country. Mr. Abraham Lincoln was the
President; Mr. Hannibal Hamlin, the Vice-President; Mr. Galusha
Grow, the Speaker of the House of Representatives; Mr. Salmon Chase,
the Secretary of the Treasury; Mr. Caleb Smith, the Attorney-
General; Mr. Simon Cameron, the Secretary of War; and Mr. Gideon
Welles, the Secretary of the Navy.
In the Senate House, as in the other house, there are very
commodious galleries for strangers, running round the entire
chambers, and these galleries are open to all the world. As with
all such places in the States, a large portion of them is
appropriated to ladies. But I came at last to find that the word
lady signified a female or a decently dressed man. Any arrangement
for classes is in America impossible; the seats intended for
gentlemen must, as a matter of course, be open to all men; but by
giving up to the rougher sex half the amount of accommodation
nominally devoted to ladies, the desirable division is to a certain
extent made. I generally found that I could obtain admittance to
the ladies' gallery if my coat were decent and I had gloves with me.
All the adjuncts of both these chambers are rich and in good
keeping. The staircases are of marble, and the outside passages and
lobbies are noble in size and in every way convenient. One knows
well the trouble of getting into the House of Lords and House of
Commons, and the want of comfort which attends one there; and an
Englishman cannot fail to make comparisons injurious to his own
country. It would not, perhaps, be possible to welcome all the
world in London as is done in Washington, but there can be no good
reason why the space given to the public with us should not equal
that given in Washington. But, so far are we from sheltering the
public, that we have made our House of Commons so small that it will
not even hold all its own members.
I had an opportunity of being present at one of their field days in
the senate, Slidell and Mason had just then been sent from Fort
Warren across to England in the Rinaldo. And here I may as well say
what further there is for me to say about those two heroes. I was
in Boston when they were taken, and all Boston was then full of
them. I was at Washington when they were surrendered, and at
Washington for a time their names were the only household words in
vogue. To me it had from the first been a matter of certainty that
England would demand the restitution of the men. I had never
attempted to argue the matter on the legal points, but I felt, as
though by instinct, that it would be so. First of all there reached
us, by telegram from Cape Race, rumors of what the press in England
was saying; rumors of a meeting in Liverpool, and rumors of the
feeling in London. And then the papers followed, and we got our
private letters. It was some days before we knew what was actually
the demand made by Lord Palmerston's cabinet; and during this time,
through the five or six days which were thus passed, it was clear to
be seen that the American feeling was undergoing a great change - or
if not the feeling, at any rate the purpose. Men now talked of
surrendering these Commissioners, as though it were a line of
conduct which Mr. Seward might find convenient; and then men went
further, and said that Mr. Seward would find any other line of
conduct very inconvenient. The newspapers, one after another, came
round. That, under all these circumstances, the States government
behaved well in the matter, no one, I think, can deny; but the
newspapers, taken as a whole, were not very consistent, and, I
think, not very dignified.
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