interested the little city of thirty thousand people almost to a man or a woman in the proceedings at the Capitol. But as one sees Washington to-day, Washington cares very little what is going on at the Capitol. People are quite too dependent

WASHINGTON FROM ARLINGTON HEIGHTS, 1872.

on their newspapers to distress themselves. Exactly as there are many people in Albany this winter who have not been to the state Capitol of New York, as there have been as many people in Boston, Hartford, and Providence who have not been to the State Houses of Massachusetts, Connecticut, or Rhode Island, so you would

find that in the city of Washington in the last winter two-thirds of the men and women had not been into the Senate Chamber of the nation or into the House of Representatives. But that was not so when the question in the Capitol was supposed to be the question whether the United States is a nation or the United States are a confederacy.

CHAPTER X

THE NEW WASHINGTON

YES, I suppose in a fashion all capitals are alike. But the people in Washington are a little apt to suppose that their capital is more like London or Berlin or Paris than it is. Napoleon used to say that there were men in cellars in Paris who had never heard of his name, who had never heard of Louis XVI's name, and who knew practically almost nothing of the years between Louis XVI and what Carlyle called the "whiff of grape-shot." I suppose something like this is true now. This could not be true in Washington. Yet in Washington there are thousands of people who are hard at work and do the Lord's business who are very indifferent to the names of the figureheads or the steersmen of the day. I have asked Cambridge undergraduates to tell me with whom they were reading their

Latin or their political history, and they have not known the name of their teacher. I do not think I could ask any official of the twenty-five thousand in Washington who was the President of the United States and find him ignorant. But I do think there

JOSEPH G. CANNON.

In every department, and this is fortunate for the country, there are some men quite too useful to be turned out on a change of administration. Whoever else goes, Mr. A. B. must remain, or Mr. X. Y., to keep the machine running. They

told me in Paris when I was first there that when Louis Philippe became king, in 1830, there were clerks in the public offices who had served there since Louis XVI was on the throne. That was more than forty years. Directoire, First Consulate, Empire, Bourbon, it was all one to them; the king's work or the republic's work went on with even step, æquo pede.

Any change in such order, as you can see, is bad. I remember I once had a letter from Washington to ask me if I could tell them where Kohl's maps were a collection of considerable value which Mr. J. G. Kohl had made for them. I said I would show them the first time I was in Washington, and then I took one of the gentlemen of the Department which wanted to know took him in a cab to a house which the Department had occupied in the war, and went up into a particular hallway where was the original chest in which Kohl's maps were to be found. There have to be certain permanent people who remember such traditions of the Department.

Sometimes such people drop into the habits