commissioner bade them put sawdust and ashes on the ice of their sidewalks, to the great surprise of a considerable part of the population.

To continue for a moment the comparison of the Washington of 1844 and that of 1904, I may

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, ABOUT 1850.

say this, that in square miles or square inches the nation of that day was not half as large as is the nation of to-day, and I may say that half the nation then was pretending and trying to feel a certain indifference toward national legislation, and I may say that everything then depended

upon mails and nothing on the telegraph; and that the mail of that day took, on an average, five times as much time for its service as the mail does now. I remember seeing a man who had been riding day and night from New Orleans "looked

as if he had just come out of a state's prison," as somebody said. It was in Philadelphia, and he had been eight days and eight nights doing it.

So it happened that whoever came to Washington then felt in fact somewhat as a man feels who now happens in at Quebec or at Glasgow. He came out of America into Washington. Just now the truth is exactly the other way: you come into America when you come into Washington. Take my own dear townsmen. To this hour the very best of them doubt the real existence of any important communities in the world farther off than Springfield on the west, or Portland on the north, or Newport on the south. And those very people come here by stress of weathera Raymond excursion party, for instance somewhat as if they were going to the City of Mexico. They find here better houses than they

left at home; they find the Congressional Library, they find people who have just happened over from Seattle or Santa Barbara; so really, for the first time, they get some idea of what their country is.

Indeed, one could not contrive a better little

pattern of America than he gets when he goes through the street in which he passes a palace such as has no superior in the world and comes next to the clay bank left by "Boss" Shepard, next to which there is a slab shanty perched up on the top of a bank waiting for some Western Senator