The Black Lion Inn

by Alfred Henry Lewis

By an industrious perusal of the Congressional directory, wherein the skeleton of each House was laid out and told in all its divers committee small-bones, Jim Britt began to understand a few of the lions in his path. For his confusion he found that Congress was sub-divided into full sixty committees, beginning with such giant conventions as the Ways and Means, Appropriations, Military, Naval, Coinage, Weights and Measures, Banking and Currency, Indian, Public Lands, Postal, and Pensions, and dwindling down to ignoble riffraff—which owned each a chairman, a committee room, a full complement of clerks and messengers, and an existence, but never convened—like the Committee on Acoustics and Ventliation, and Alcoholic Liquor Traffic.

Jim Britt learned also of the Sergeants at Arms of Senate and House, and how these dignitaries controlled the money for those bodies and paid the members their salaries. Incidentally, and by way of gossip, he was told of that House Sergeant who had levanted with the riches entrusted to his hands, and left the broken membership, gnashing its teeth in poverty and impotent gloom, unable to draw pay.

Then, too, there was a Document Room where the bills and resolutions were kept when printed. Also, about each of the five doors of House and Senate, when those sacred gatherings were in session, there were situated a host of messengers, carried for twelve hundred dollars a year each on the Doorkeeper’s rolls. It was the duty and pleasure of these myrmidons to bring forth members into the corridors, to the end that they be refreshed with a word of counsel from constituents who had traveled thither for that purpose; and in the finish to lend said constituents money to return home.

Jim Britt, following these first connings of the directory, went personally to the capitol, and from the galleries, leaning his chin on the rail the while, gazed earnestly on greatness about the transaction of its fame. These studies and personally conducted tours, and those conversations to be their incident which came off between Jim Britt and chance-blown folk who fell across his pathway, enlarged Jim Britt’s store of information in sundry fashions. He discovered that full ten thousand bills and resolutions were introduced each Congress; that by virtue of a mere narrowness of time not more than five per cent, of this storm of business could be dealt with, the other ninety-five, whether for good or ill, being starved to death for lack of occasion. The days themselves were no longer than five working hours since Congress convened at noon.

The great radical difference between House and Senate loomed upon Jim Britt in a contrast of powers which abode with the presiding officers of those mills to grind new laws. The president of the Senate owned few or none. He might enforce Jefferson’s rules for debates and call a recalcitrant senator to order, a call to which the recalcitrant paid little heed beyond tart remarks on his part concerning his own high determinations to yield to no gavel tyranny, coupled with a forceful though conceited assurance flung to the Senate at large, that he, the recalcitrant, knew his rights (which he never did), and would uphold them (which he never failed to do.) The Senate president named no committees; owned no control over the order of business; indeed he was limited to a vote on ties, a warning that he would clear the galleries (which was never done) when the public therein roosting, applauded, and the right to prevent two senators from talking at one and the same time. These marked the utmost measure of his influence. Any senator could get the floor for any purpose, and talk on any subject from Prester John to Sheep in the Seventeenth Century, while his strength stood. Also, and much as dogs have kennels permitted them for their habitation, the presiding officer of the Senate—in other words, the Vice-President of the nation—was given a room, separate and secluded to himself, into which he might creep when chagrin for his own unimportance should overmaster him or otherwise his woes become greater than he might publicly bear.

The House Speaker was a vastly different cock, with a louder crow and longer spur. The Speaker was a king, indeed; and an absolute monarch or an autocrat or what you will that signifies one who may do as he chooses, exercise unbridled will, and generally sit beneath the broad shadows of the vine and the fig tree of his prerogatives with none to molest him or make him afraid. The Speaker was, so to phrase it, the entire House, the other three hundred and fifty-five members acting only when he consented or compelled them, and then usually by his suggestion and always under his thumb. No bill could be considered without the Speaker’s permission; and then for so long only as he should allow, and by what members he preferred. No man could speak to a measure wanting the gracious consent of this dignitary; and no word could be uttered—at least persisted in—To which he felt distaste. The Speaker, when lengths and breadths are measured, was greater than the Moscow Czar and showed him a handless infant by comparison.

As a half-glove of velvet for his iron hand, and to mask and soften his pure autocracy—which if seen naked might shock the spirit of Americanism—there existed a Rules Committee. This subbody, whereof the Speaker was chief, carried, besides himself, but two members; and these he personally selected, as indeed he did the entire membership of every committee on the House muster-rolls. This Rules Committee, with the Speaker in absolute sway, acted with reference to the House at large as do the Board of Judges for a racecourse. It declared each day what bills should be taken up, limited debate, and to pursue the Track simile to a last word, called on this race or cleared the course of that race, and fairly speaking dry-nursed the House throughout its travels, romps and lessons.

Jim Britt discovered that in all, counting Speaker, Rules Committee, and a dozen chairmen of the great committees, there existed no more than fifteen folk who might by any stretch of veracity be said to have a least of voice in the transaction of House business. In the gagged and bound cases of the other three hundred and forty-one, and for what public good or ill to flow from them, their constituents would have fared as well had they, instead of electing these representatives, confined themselves to writing the government a letter setting forth their wants.

In reference to his own bill, Jim Britt convinced himself of two imposing truths. Anybody would and could introduce it in either House or Senate or in both at once; then, when thus introduced and it had taken the routine course to the proper committee, the situation would ask the fervent agreement of a majority in each body, to say nothing of the Speaker’s consent—a consent as hard to gain as a girl’s—to bring it up for passage.

Nor was there any security of concert. The bill might be fashionable, not to say popular, with one body, while the other turned rigid back upon it. It might live in the House to die in the Senate, or succeed in the Senate and perish in the House. There were no safety and little hope to be won in any corner, and the lone certainty to peer forth upon Jim Britt was that the chances stood immeasurably against him wherever he turned his eyes. The camel for the needle’s eye and the rich man into heaven, were easy and feasible when laid side by side with the Congressional outlook for his bill.