Somebody has said of the “House of Representatives,” “it is too big for business, too big for harmony, too big for economy, too big for any practical purpose whatever,” and the prospect is that it will be larger, rather than smaller. Speaker Carlisle found it almost unwieldy when he organized the four hundred and one members into committees. We venture the assertion that no officer in the United States Government in his official capacity passes through a more trying ordeal than the Speaker of the House. He must face his work every day of the session, in the hall where he presides; and as for ambition and jealousy, tact and skill in manipulation, the representatives of the people are so well along in all these things that to ask one man to appoint this company to places on committees, and then to legislate for the people, is too much. A new method of appointing committees ought to be adopted.
Mr George Ticknor Curtis has rendered the American public a valuable service in his two volumes on the life of James Buchanan, published by the Harper Brothers. If this material had been precipitated upon the public mind in the dark days of the civil war, it would have been as fuel to the flame of public passion, or if it had come to light even during the years immediately after the war, the result would have been much the same. Mr. Buchanan’s task during the last days of his administration was a hard one. He was expected to both wait and to be in a hurry in discharging his duties as President; besides, it required more than human sagacity to determine what would be the wisest course for his administration to pursue. The time when he vacated the White House, and Mr. Lincoln went into it, makes a joint in American history which must be studied as with a microscope, if the student would reach a correct judgment of the men who acted and the events that transpired. The correspondence which passed between Mr. Buchanan and several members of his old cabinet, after he retired to private life is like the glare of an electric light turned on those turbulent times. By these letters one can read his way out of the heretofore inexplicable darkness of those caverns of history.
John Brown, of Ossawatomie fame, has been glorified in poetry and song. There has been a bewitching charm about his name to a multitude of people, and the events of the past decade have contributed largely to this spell. As we settle back into our normal condition and study the naked facts of his history, we are led to wonder how the man exerted such a tremendous influence over his countrymen. If it be true that Sherman, Doyles and Wilkinson, with others, whom Brown and his men murdered, had entered into a conspiracy to destroy the Browns, this did not justify John Brown and his men for murdering them in cold blood. Not even in warfare would such heartless butchery be defensible. It may yet appear that the endorsement which the American people gave to John Brown, and the glory they have attached to his memory were unworthily bestowed, and that the people were misled. The close study of American history as made between 1858 and 1865 may put a new face on many of our biographical and national stories of men and events.
John Pender, a member of the English Parliament, compliments the Western Union Telegraph Company, in a speech on the government assuming control of telegraph lines, in these words: “I have thought it desirable to refer to my visit to America, and say something about the Western Union system, because it is a system which is, probably, in its efficiency, only to be compared with our own system in England, which is worked by the Government, with this difference, that being worked as a private enterprise, and being stimulated more or less by competition, I think the Western Union has shown greater results during the last ten years than our system has under government management. I think the science of electricity has received more encouragement and been more developed, and the reduction of rates has, during that time, also been greater in America than in England; and, altogether, I think it would be well if our Government took a leaf out of the book of the Western Union Company.”
December the sixteenth was John G. Whittier’s birthday. He is now seventy-six years old. In Haverhill, Massachusetts, a thrifty manufacturing town, Mr. Whittier spent his boyhood, in a lonely farm house half hidden by oak woods, with no other house in sight of it. He says, on stormy nights