Pine to Potomac

by E. K. Cressey

“Yes, sir,” replied Mr. Butler.

“Did I not show him the manuscript?”

“Yes, sir,” was the reply.

“And at his suggestion,” continued Mr. Blaine, “I added these words, ‘and the expenses of said committee shall be paid from the contingent fund of the House of Representatives’ (applause), and the fact that ways and means were wanted to pay the expenses was the only objection he made to it.”

It appears that the resolution was considered as a test of the Republicanism of members. General Butler had been asked to take the chairmanship, but refused, and said he would have nothing to do with the resolution; but Mr. Blaine put him on the committee, and when asked why, replied, “Because I knew very well that if I omitted the appointment of the gentleman it would be heralded throughout the length and breadth of the country by the claquers, who have so industriously distributed this letter this morning, that the speaker had packed the committee, as the gentleman said he would, with ‘weak-kneed Republicans,’ who would not go into an investigation vigorously, as he would. That was the reason (applause), so that the chair laid the responsibility upon the gentleman of declining the appointment, and now the gentleman from Massachusetts is on his responsibility before the country,” and there we leave him.

It can but be with peculiar interest that we read the strong words of the oath taken so repeatedly by Mr. Blaine, and administered the second time by Mr. Dawes, of Massachusetts, after he had received one hundred and twenty-six votes, to ninety-two for Gen. George W. Morgan, of Ohio.

It kept a large committee busy to pass upon the character of members-elect and the legality of their election. Such was the broken condition of state governments in the South, so battered by war, and distracted by schism and contending factions. All of these perplexities adhered to applicants for membership in congress, presenting credentials of membership various in value as greenbacks and gold, and these same perplexities affected the staple of congressional measures.

Congress was increasing rapidly in the number of its members, so that while one hundred and ninety-two votes were cast at Mr. Blaine’s first election to the speakership in 1869, there were two hundred and sixty-nine votes cast at his election to the same office in 1873, of which number he received one hundred and eighty-nine, and Mr. Ferdinand Wood received seventy-six.

Mr. Blaine refers to it in his address to the “Gentlemen of the House of Representatives,” the last time he was elected speaker. “To be chosen,” he says, “speaker of the House of Representatives is always an honorable distinction; to be chosen a third time enhances the honor more than three fold; to be chosen by the largest body that ever assembled in the Capitol imposes a burden of responsibility which only your indulgent kindness could embolden me to assume. The first occupant of this chair presided over a House of sixty-five members, representing a population far below the present aggregate of the state of New York. At that time there were not, in the whole United States, fifty thousand civilized inhabitants to be found one hundred miles distant from the flow of the Atlantic tide. To-day, gentlemen, a large majority of you come from beyond that limit, and represent districts peopled then only by the Indian and the adventurous frontiersman.

“The national government is not yet as old as many of its citizens, but in this brief span of time,—less than one lengthened life,—it has, under God’s good providence, extended its power until a continent is the field of its empire, and attests the majesty of its law.