University of Virginia Library

24. CHAPTER XXIV.

THE capital of the Great Republic was a new world to
country-bred Washington Hawkins. St. Louis was a
greater city, but its floating population did not hail from
great distances, and so it had the general family aspect of the
permanent population; but Washington gathered its people
from the four winds of heaven, and so the manners, the faces
and the fashions there, presented a variety that was infinite.
Washington had never been in “society” in St. Louis, and
he knew nothing of the ways of its wealthier citizens and
had never inspected one of their dwellings. Consequently,
everything in the nature of modern fashion and grandeur
was a new and wonderful revelation to him.

Washington is an interesting city to any of us. It seems
to become more and more interesting the oftener we visit it.
Perhaps the reader has never been there? Very well. You
arrive either at night, rather too late to do anything or see
anything until morning, or you arrive so early in the morning
that you consider it best to go to your hotel and sleep an
hour or two while the sun bothers along over the Atlantic.
You cannot well arrive at a pleasant intermediate hour,
because the railway corporation that keeps the keys of the
only door that leads into the town or out of it take care of
that. You arrive in tolerably good spirits, because it is only

[ILLUSTRATION]

KEEP OUT OF HERE SIR!
AN OLD ONE.

[Description: 499EAF. Page 218. In-line images of a man being beaten by another man, and an empty covered wagon with horses attached.] thirty-eight miles from Baltimore to the capital, and so you
have only been insulted three times (provided you are not in
a sleeping car—the average
is higher, there): once
when you renewed your
ticket after stopping over
in Baltimore, once when
you were about to enter
the “ladies' car” without
knowing it was a lady's
car, and once when you
asked the conductor at
what hour you would reach
Washington.

You are assailed by a
long rank of hackmen who
shake their whips in your
face as you step out upon
the sidewalk; you enter
what they regard as a
“carriage,” in the capital,
and you wonder why they do not take it out of service and
put it in the museum: we have few enough antiquities, and

it is little to our credit that we make scarcely any effort to
preserve the few we have. You reach your hotel, presently
—and here let us draw the curtain of charity—because of
course you have gone to the wrong one. You being a stranger,
how could you do otherwise? There are a hundred and
eighteen bad hotels, and only one good one. The most
renowned and popular hotel of them all is perhaps the worst
one known to history.

It is winter, and night. When you arrived, it was snowing.
When you reached the hotel, it was sleeting. When
you went to bed, it was raining. During the night it froze
hard, and the wind blew some chimneys down. When you
got up in the morning, it was foggy. When you finished
your breakfast at ten o'clock and went out, the sunshine was
brilliant, the weather balmy and delicious, and the mud and
slush deep and all-pervading. You will like the climate—
when you get used to it.

You naturally wish to view the city; so you take an
umbrella, an overcoat, and a fan, and go forth. The prominent

features you soon locate and get familiar with; first
you glimpse the ornamental upper works of a long, snowy
palace projecting above a grove of trees, and a tall, graceful
white dome with a statue on it surmounting the palace and
pleasantly contrasting with the back-ground of blue sky.
That building is the capitol; gossips will tell you that by the
original estimates it was to cost $12,000,000, and that the
government did come within $27,200,000 of building if for
that sum.

You stand at the back of the capitol to treat yourself to a
view, and it is a very noble one. You understand, the capitol
stands upon the verge of a high piece of table land, a fine
commanding position, and its front looks out over this noble
situation for a city—but it don't see it, for the reason that
when the capitol extension was decided upon, the property
owners at once advanced their prices to such inhuman figures
that the people went down and built the city in the muddy
low marsh behind the temple of liberty; so now the lordly
front of the building, with its imposing colonades, its projecting,
graceful wings, its picturesque groups of statuary,
and its long terraced ranges of steps, flowing down in white
marble waves to the ground, merely looks out upon a sorrowful
little desert of cheap boarding houses.

So you observe, that you take your view from the back of
the capitol. And yet not from the airy outlooks of the
dome, by the way, because to get there you must pass through
the great rotunda: and to do that, you would have to see the
marvelous Historical Paintings that hang there, and the bas-reliefs—and
what have you done that you should suffer thus?
And besides, you might have to pass through the old part of
the building, and you could not help seeing Mr. Lincoln, as
petrified by a young lady artist for $10,000—and you might
take his marble emancipation proclamation, which he holds
out in his hand and contemplates, for a folded napkin; and
you might conceive from his expression and his attitude, that
he is finding fault with the washing. Which is not the case.
Nobody knows what is the matter with him; but everybody
feels for him. Well, you ought not to go into the dome any

[ILLUSTRATION]

REARED BY A GRATEFUL COUNTRY.

[Description: 499EAF. Page 221. In-line image of a landscape with a large broken stone with two people standing in front of it.] how, because it would be utterly impossible to go up there
without seeing the frescoes in it—and why should you be
interested in the delirium tremens of art?

The capitol is a very noble and a very beautiful building,
both within and without, but you need not examine it now.
Still, if you greatly prefer going into the dome, go. Now
your general glance gives you picturesque stretches of gleaming
water, on your left, with a sail here and there and a lunatic
asylum on shore; over beyond the water, on a distant
elevation, you see a squat yellow temple which your eye
dwells upon lovingly through a blur of unmanly moisture,
for it recals your lost boyhood and the Parthenons done in
molasses candy which made it blest and beautiful. Still in
the distance, but on this side of the water and close to its
edge, the Monument to the Father of his Country towers out
of the mud—sacred soil is the customary term. It has the
aspect of a factory chimney with the top broken off. The
skeleton of a decaying scaffolding lingers about its summit,
and tradition says that the spirit of Washington often comes

down and sits on those rafters to enjoy this tribute of respect
which the nation has reared as the symbol of its unappeasable
gratitude. The Monument is to be finished, some day, and
at that time our Washington will have risen still higher in
the nation's veneration, and will be known as the Great-Great-Grandfather
of his Country. The memorial Chimney
stands in a quiet pastoral locality that is full of reposeful
expression. With a glass you can see the cow-sheds about its
base, and the contented sheep nimbling pebbles in the desert
solitudes that surround it, and the tired pigs dozing in the
holy calm of its protecting shadow.

Now you wrench your gaze loose and you look down in
front of you and see the broad Pennsylvania Avenue stretching
straight ahead for a mile or more till it brings up against
the iron fence in front of a pillared granite pile, the Treasury
building—an edifice that would command respect in any capital.
The stores and hotels that wall in this broad avenue
are mean, and cheap, and dingy, and are better left without
comment. Beyond the Treasury is a fine large white barn,
with wide unhandsome grounds about it. The President
lives there. It is ugly enough outside, but that is nothing to
what it is inside. Dreariness, flimsiness, bad taste reduced to
mathematical completeness is what the inside offers to the
eye, if it remains yet what it always has been.

The front and right hand views give you the city at large.
It is a wide stretch of cheap little brick houses, with here
and there a noble architectural pile lifting itself out of the
midst—government buildings, these. If the thaw is still
going on when you come down and go about town, you will
wonder at the short-sightedness of the city fathers, when you
come to inspect the streets, in that they do not dilute the
mud a little more and use them for canals.

If you inquire around a little, you will find that there are
more boarding houses to the square acre in Washington than
there are in any other city in the land, perhaps. If you apply
for a home in one of them, it will seem odd to you to have
the landlady inspect you with a severe eye and then ask you

if you are a member of Congress. Perhaps, just as a pleasantry,
you will say yes. And then she will tell you that she
is “full.” Then you show her her advertisement in the
morning paper, and there she stands, convicted and ashamed.
She will try to blush, and it will be only polite in you to take
the effort for the deed. She shows you her rooms, now, and
lets you take one—but she makes you pay in advance for it.
That is what you will get for pretending to be a member of
Congress. If you had been content to be merely a private
citizen, your trunk would have been sufficient security for
your board. If you are curious and inquire into this thing,
the chances are that your landlady will be ill-natured enough
to say that the person and property of a Congressman are
exempt from arrest or detention, and that with the tears in
her eyes she has seen several of the people's representatives
walk off to their several States and Territories carrying her
unreceipted board bills in their pockets for keepsakes. And
before you have been in Washington many weeks you will
he mean enough to believe her, too.

Of course you contrive to see everything and find out
everything. And one of the first and most startling things
you find out is, that every individual you encounter in the
City of Washington almost—and certainly every separate
and distinct individual in the public employment, from the
highest bureau chief, clear down to the maid who scrubs Department
halls, the night watchmen of the public buildings
and the darkey boy who purifies the Department spittoons—
represents Political Influence. Unless you can get the ear of
a Senator, or a Congressman, or a Chief of a Bureau or Department,
and persuade him to use his “influence” in your
behalf, you cannot get an employment of the most trivial
nature in Washington. Mere merit, fitness and capability, are
useless baggage to you without “influence.” The population
of Washington consists pretty much entirely of government
employés and the people who board them. There are
thousands of these employés, and they have gathered there
from every corner of the Union and got their berths through

the intercession (command is nearer the word) of the Senators
and Representatives of their respective States. It would be
an odd circumstance to see a girl get employment at three or
four dollars a week in one of the great public cribs without
any political grandee to back her, but merely because she was
worthy, and competent, and a good citizen of a free country
that “treats all persons alike.” Washington would be mildly
thunderstruck at such a thing as that. If you are a member
of Congress, (no offence,) and one of your constituents who
doesn't know anything, and does not want to go into the
bother of learning something, and has no money, and no employment,
and can't earn a living, comes besieging you for
help, do you say, “Come, my friend, if your services were
valuable you could get employment elsewhere—don't want you
here?” Oh, no. You take him to a Department and say,
“Here, give this person something to pass away the time at
—and a salary”—and the thing is done. You throw him on
his country. He is his country's child, let his country
support him. There is something good and motherly about
Washington, the grand old benevolent National Asylum for
the Helpless.

The wages received by this great hive of employés are
placed at the liberal figure meet and just for skilled and competent
labor. Such of them as are immediately employed
about the two Houses of Congress, are not only liberally paid
also, but are remembered in the customary Extra Compensation
bill which slides neatly through, annually, with the general
grab that signalizes the last night of a session, and thus
twenty per cent. is added to their wages, for—for fun, no
doubt.

Washington Hawkins' new life was an unceasing delight
to him. Senator Dilworthy lived sumptuously, and Washington's
quarters were charming—gas; running water, hot
and cold; bath-room, coal fires, rich carpets, beautiful pictures
on the walls; books on religion, temperance, public
charities and financial schemes; trim colored servants, dainty
food—everything a body could wish for. And as for stationery,
there was no end to it; the government furnished it;
postage stamps were not needed—the Senator's frank could
convey a horse through the mails, if necessary.

And then he saw such dazzling company. Renowned
generals and admirals who had seemed but colossal myths
when he was in the far west, went in and out before him or
sat at the Senator's table, solidified into palpable flesh and
blood; famous statesmen crossed his path daily; that once
rare and awe-inspiring being, a Congressman, was become a
common spectacle—a spectacle so common, indeed, that he
could contemplate it without excitement, even without embarrassment;
foreign ministers were visible to the naked eye
at happy intervals; he had looked upon the President himself,
and lived. And more, this world of enchantment teemed
with speculation—the whole atmosphere was thick with it—
and that indeed was Washington Hawkins' native air; none
other refreshed his lungs so gratefully. He had found paradise
at last.

The more he saw of his chief the Senator, the more he

honored him, and the more conspicuously the moral grandeur
of his character appeared to stand out. To possess the
friendship and the kindly interest of such a man, Washington
said in a letter to Louise, was a happy fortune for a young
man whose career had been so impeded and so clouded as his.

The weeks drifted by; Harry Brierly flirted, danced, added
lustre to the brilliant Senatorial receptions, and diligently
“buzzed” and “button-holed” Congressmen in the interest
of the Columbus River scheme; meantime Senator Dilworthy
labored hard in the same interest—and in others of equal
national importance. Harry wrote frequently to Sellers, and
always encouragingly; and from these letters it was easy to
see that Harry was a pet with all Washington, and was likely
to carry the thing through; that the assistance rendered him
by “old Dilworthy” was pretty fair—pretty fair; “and
every little helps, you know,” said Harry.

Washington wrote Sellers officially, now and then. In one
of his letters it appeared that whereas no member of the
House committee favored the scheme at first, there was now
needed but one more vote to compass a majority report.
Closing sentence:

(Signed,) “Abner Dilworthy, U. S. S.,
per Washington Hawkins, P. S.”

At the end of a week, Washington was able to send
the happy news,—officially, as usual,—that the needed
vote had been added and the bill favorably reported from the
Committee. Other letters recorded its perils in Committee
of the whole, and by and by its victory, by just the skin of its
teeth, on third reading and final passage. Then came letters
telling of Mr. Dilworthy's struggles with a stubborn majority
in his own Committee in the Senate; of how these gentlemen
succumbed, one by one, till a majority was secured.

Then there was a hiatus. Washington watched every
move on the board, and he was in a good position to do this,
for he was clerk of this committee, and also one other. He
received no salary as private secretary, but these two clerkships,
procured by his benefactor, paid him an aggregate

[ILLUSTRATION] [Description: 499EAF. Page 227. Tail-piece image of a window and curtains, looking out on a large building.] of twelve dollars a day, without counting the twenty per
cent. extra compensation which would of course be voted to
him on the last night of the session.

He saw the bill go into Committee of the whole and struggle
for its life again, and finally worry through. In the fullness
of time he noted its second reading, and by and by the
day arrived when the grand ordeal came, and it was put upon
its final passage. Washington listened with bated breath to
the “Aye!” “No!” “No!” “Aye!” of the voters, for
a few dread minutes, and then could bear the suspense no
longer. He ran down from the gallery and hurried home to
wait.

At the end of two or three hours the Senator arrived in the
bosom of his family, and dinner was waiting. Washington
sprang forward, with the eager question on his lips, and the
Senator said:

“We may rejoice freely, now, my son—Providence has
crowned our efforts with success.”