第164章

Thus they are counted, and the noes are counted in the same way. 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 Iwas 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.