d make the House an annex to his
workshop of a Senate. He would hook up House and Senate as a coachman
hooks up his team, and driving them tandem or abreast as the exigencies
of the hour suggested, see how far two such powerful agencies might take
him on his White House road.

It was on the side of Senator Hanway a brilliant thought and a daring
one, this plan to seize a Speakership and apply it to his personal
fortunes; for your Speakership is that office second only to a
Presidency, and comes often to be the latter's superior in practical
force. Those wise ones who designed the government intended the House of
Representatives to be a republic. Through its own groveling abjections,
however, it long ago sunk to an autocracy with the Speaker in the role
of autocrat. It sold its birthright for no one knows what mess of
pottage to pass its slavish days beneath a tyranny of the gavel. The
Speaker settles all things. No measure is proposed, no bill passes, no
member speaks except by the Speaker's will. He constructs the committees
and selects their chairmen and lays out their work. With a dozen
members, every one of whom votes and acts beneath his thumb, the Speaker
transacts the story of the House. So far as the other three hundred and
forty odd members are concerned, the folk who sent them might as well
have written a letter. They live as much without art or part or lot in
planning and executing House affairs as do the caged menagerie animals
in the planning and execution of the affairs of what show they happen to
exist as the attractions. These caged ones of the House are never
regarded and but seldom heard. The best that one of them may gain is
"Leave to print"; which is a kind of consent to be fraudulent, and
permits a member to pretend through the Congressional Record that he
made a speech (which he never made) and was overwhelmed by applause
(which he did not receive) which swept down in thunderous peals (during
moments utterly silent) from crowded galleries (as empty as a church).

Senator Hanway, when he decided to pick out a House Speaker favorable to
his hopes, had plenty of time wherein to lay his plans. The personnel of
a coming House is known for over a year; the members are elected nearly
thirteen months before they take their seats. These thirteen months of
grace are granted the new member by the Constitution on a hopeful theory
that he will devote them to a study of his country's needs. In this
instance, as