s, but intensified the blessings of reformed thought.

There were questions that could not be solved, however, questions of
industrial moment that we almost despaired of. The tariff was one of
them. I felt convinced that the tariff question would never be settled.
The grandchildren of every generation will always be discussing it, and
thresh out the same old straw which the Democrats and Republicans were
discussing before them. When I was a boy only eight years old the tariff
was discussed just as warmly as it will ever be. Like my friend Henry
Watterson, of Kentucky, I was a Free Trader. Politics were so mixed up
it was difficult to see ahead. Cleveland was after Hill and Hill was
after Cleveland; that alone was clear to everybody.

For my own satisfaction, in the spring of 1892, I went to see what
Washington was really doing, thinking, living. It had improved morally
and politically, its streets were still the trail of the mighty. A great
change had taken place there.

A higher type of men had taken possession of our national halls.
Duelling, once common, was entirely abolished, and a Senator who would
challenge a fellow-member to fight would make himself a laughing-stock.
No more clubbing of Senators on account of opposite opinions! Mr. Covode
of Pennsylvania, no longer brandished a weapon over the head of Mr.
Barksdale of Mississippi. Grow and Keitt no more took each other by the
throat. Griswold no more pounded Lyon, Lyon snatching the tongs and
striking back until the two members in a scuffle rolled on the floor of
the great American Congress. One of the Senators of twenty-five years
ago died in Flatbush Hospital, idiotic from his dissipations. One member
of Congress I saw years ago seated drunk on the curbstone in
Philadelphia, his wife trying to coax him home. A Senator from New York
many years ago on a cold day was picked out of the Potomac, into which
he had dropped through his intoxication, the only time that he ever came
so near losing his life by too much cold water. Talk not about the good
old days, for the new days in Washington were far better. There was John
Sherman of the Senate, a moral, high-minded, patriotic and talented man.
I said to him as I looked up into his face: "How tall are you?" and his
answer was, "Six feet one inch and a half;" and I thought to myself "You
are a tall man every way, with mental stature over-towering like the
physical." There was Senator Daniel of Virginia, magnetic to th