greatness occasions, the whole people would look with more reasonableness upon those who try to do what is feasible, and with less patience upon those whom only the whole earth in the way of legislation will content.

The new member in his first term, and often long afterward, finds the rules a perpetual stumbling-stone and rock of offense. He wants to talk and to get his measures before the House, and somehow he never can. If he stops to reason about it, he will find himself again in contact with the greatness of the country.

Three hundred and fifty-six members seem to be a large number to collect together for purposes of deliberation, and numbers are a great hindrance to that deliberation which means frequent speaking and voting. Many people wonder why each decade the number is increased instead of diminished; but the increase is likely to go on for some time in the future. Large as our number of members is,

Great Britain and France, with half our population, have each a great many more.

Indeed, when you look at the constituency, the wonder ceases. Each member of Congress represents one hundred and fifty thousand citizens, and in many districts two hundred thousand. The business which all these people have in Washington centers in the Congressman, and as I have already pointed out, it makes for him plenty of work. So great has this work become that by law each member has a clerk. Although the expense to the nation is not trifling, and the assistance was voted with some fear and trembling on our part, there has not been, so far as I know, the slightest criticism of the act.

Of what Congress does in the way of public acts, everybody has some idea. All great questions which agitate the nation come there for final settlement. Of course the settlement is always on some basis which the members think will

satisfy all or most of the people.

That

often turns out to be a mistake, for people often think they want what they do not want at all, and they are always ready to punish legislators who give them the bad things they thought they wanted.

Appropriation bills settle a good many Congressional questions. By them, for instance, our great lake commerce, fostered by improvements in rivers and harbors, has been built up until it much surpasses the great foreign commerce which we have with the whole outside world; and what Madison and Munroe thought we could not constitutionally do at all, we do every session with the full agreement of both political parties.

All these great questions, like the example just given, are known and noticed by many of the people. But one great business which Congress does passes without anybody's notice. Congress is the great and general court. All the com

plaints, demands, and wishes of the people come to it.

In the great majority of cases nothing is done, but of ten thousand proposed laws perhaps six per cent or less become law. So in a court of justice many cases are brought, and but few tried.

But the existence of a court where complaints can be made with a chance of redress is a great help to human life. Before and after a man has brought his suit the fact that he can have even an unsuccessful hearing goes a great way toward calming his spirit. So in Congress, if a man can have a committee examine his case, even if no remedy is found, he becomes more reconciled to the inevitable.

Members of Congress, even when assembled in performance of their duties, do not always behave amiably. Some people think their behavior is growing worse, but it is not so. Such collisions as occasionally take place have always taken place, from the time when Griswold

and Lyon encountered each other on the floor down to our day. They all happen in the same way: men get heated mentally, and sometimes physically; then they are bad-tempered, they forget where they are, and they make spectacles of themselves.

One of the worst scenes I ever saw in the House was only the culmination on a hot day in July of the bad temper of the hot months. A hundred degrees in the shade is the boiling point of men.

Perhaps there never was a House that so lived on the edge of a volcano as did the House of the Forty-fifth Congress. Everybody was angry with everybody else. This was the Congress after President Hayes was elected, when everybody thought everybody else had been cheating, and nobody could strike because in striking he must deliver his blow not only at his enemies, but at those with whom his reason taught him he would have to act in the future.

Yet in that case there