et associate of Oakes Ames, said:

"Mr. Speaker: while the House slept, the enemy has sown tares among our
wheat. The corporations of this country, having neither bodies to be
kicked nor souls to be lost, have, _perhaps_ by the power of argument
alone, beguiled from the majority of my Committee the member from
Connecticut. The enemy have now a majority of one. I move to increase the
Committee to twelve."

Speaker Colfax, soon to be hurled from the Vice-president's chair for his
part with those thieves, increased his Committee.

Everybody knew that "the power of argument alone" meant ten thousand
dollars cash for the gentleman from Connecticut, who did not appear on the
floor for a week, fearing the scorpion tongue of the old Commoner.

A Congress which found it could make and unmake laws in defiance of the
Executive went mad. Taxation soared to undreamed heights, while the
currency was depreciated and subject to the wildest fluctuations.

The statute books were loaded with laws that shackled chains of monopoly
on generations yet unborn. Public lands wide as the reach of empires were
voted as gifts to private corporations, and subsidies of untold millions
fixed as a charge upon the people and their children's children.

The demoralization incident to a great war, the waste of unheard-of sums
of money, the giving of contracts involving millions by which fortunes
were made in a night, the riot of speculation and debauchery by those who
tried to get rich suddenly without labour, had created a new Capital of
the Nation. The vulture army of the base, venal, unpatriotic, and corrupt,
which had swept down, a black cloud, in wartime to take advantage of the
misfortunes of the Nation, had settled in Washington and gave new tone to
its life.

Prior to the Civil War the Capital was ruled, and the standards of its
social and political life fixed, by an aristocracy founded on brains,
culture, and blood. Power was with few exceptions intrusted to an
honourable body of high-spirited public officials. Now a negro electorate
controlled the city government, and gangs of drunken negroes, its
sovereign citizens, paraded the streets at night firing their muskets
unchallenged and unmolested.

A new mob of onion-laden breath, mixed with perspiring African odour,
became the symbol of American Democracy.

A new order of society sprouted in this corruption. The old high-bred
ways, tastes, and enthusiasms were driven into the hiding-place