CHAPTER IX
CONGRESS AT LAST WITH SOMETHING TO DO HAS NO ONE TO DO IT
When Lazarus was raised from the dead it took him a long time to find out that he was again alive. His legs were stiff from being so long extended. His arms were cramped from being decently arranged across his breast. The circulation starting in his members produced disagreeable sensations which recalled his mortal illness and the pains of dissolution. The last thing that this discomfort suggested was life.
Even thus it is with Congress, it has been so long dead that it is hard for it to realize that it has once again come to life. It suffers from various unpleasant sensations in its members, from blocs, from lack of leadership, from indifference to party, from factionalism, from individualism, from incapacity to do business. They are all vaguely reminiscent of the pains of dissolution. On the dissolution theory they are decent and explicable, for death is always decent and explicable.
As signs of life they are scandalous, and everybody body is scandalized over them for fear that a vital Congress will be something new to reckon with.
If Congress does realize that it has waked from the dead, who will be worse scandalized than the senile persons whom the newspapers respectfully call its "leaders"? What more threatening spectacle for second childhood is there than first childhood?
Suppose Congress were again a lusty and vigorous creature with the blood of youth in its veins, how long would Henry Cabot Lodge, aged seventy-two, remain leader of the Senate? Lodge, the irascible old man, with worn nerves, who claps his hands for the Senate pages as if they were not of the same flesh and blood with himself, and who would, if he could follow his instincts, clap his hands in the same way to summon the majority Senators, the recluse who is kept alive by old servants who understand and anticipate every whim, to enjoy greedily the petty distinctions that have come to him late because the Senate itself was more than half dead?
And who would be worse scandalized than the ancient committee chairman, some with one foot in the grave? At one time in the first year of Mr. Harding's administration the important chairmanships in the Senate were disposed thus: Finance, the most powerful committee, Senator Penrose, a dying man; Foreign Relations, Senator Lodge, 72; Interstate Commerce, Senator Cummins, 72, and broken with illness; Judiciary, Senator Nelson, 79 and living back in the Civil War in which he served as a private; Immigration, Senator Colt, 76.
Suppose Congress should come to life and represent the real interests of the various sections, classes, and, let us say, kinds of property and business in this country—how long would the Senate remain such a pleasant place to die in?