Our Washington Residence.
(Text, 223.)
While at Aguas Calientes, bathing in the hot springs, Nannie, knowing the embarrassments of military courts in determining when an officer was drunk, brought me a copy of an inscription she had found on the wall of her room, probably left there by one seeking recovery from delirium tremens and at the same time preparing a test for the consideration of the members of the next court before which he might be brought.
"Not drunk is he who from the floor
Can rise again and still drink more,
But drunk is he who helpless lies
Without the power to drink or rise."
Spending most of our time in Washington, we found members of both Houses of Congress were much misunderstood by the people. They are constant hard workers with small salaries and almost universally honorable, honest men, and not, as many people believe, as they do of the army and navy, idle and uninterested in the government's welfare. Public sentiment has compelled many legislators to abandon the profession for another where they are better understood and better paid.
Among these noble men, I want to pay a tribute to a few of the finest statesmen the country has seen since the War of the Rebellion; men who trimmed their sails to no passing breeze but stood steadfastly for that public policy which would in their opinion bear best fruits for the great republic in the future. First among them, I put President Cleveland, Senator Hoar and Senator Root.
Cleveland, I consider the Washington of his time. When special classes of labor, having in their trust the railroads, the principal utilities of the whole people, declared their purpose to strike and by force and violence make their class the ruling class, the President issued his famous executive order that "if it took all the money in the treasury and all the soldiers in the army to carry a postal card from New York to San Francisco, the card would be delivered."