(To be Continued.)
CONDENSED CONGRESS.
SENATE.
| Down again came the furious FRANK. But not the fiery Hun. Mr. STOCKTON was Frank. He said he represented New Jersey. (Enthusiastic Groans.) The constituents of New Jersey were a peculiar people. Such was their depravity that they said they would rather have fifty per cent taken off their taxes than to receive the speeches of their representatives in Congress free of charge. Under these circumstances they looked upon the franking privilege, he regretted to say, as a swindle, and remonstrated with him, with tears in their expressive and fish-like eyes, against being hidden by a shower of public documents. The Congressional Globe made a very inferior article of lamp-lighters, and the proud pigs of New Jersey declined to fatten upon the Patent Office reports. Mr. TIPTON was in favor of the franking privilege. What good would it do anybody if Congressmen drew postage-stamps in lieu of writing their names. As for him, he found it much easier to draw postage-stamps than to write his name, and he was sure that none of them were so lost to a sense of their own dignity as to pay their own postages, like ordinary human beings. |
Mr. STEWART said certainly not. The only thing was that there would be an account kept of the number of postage-stamps they drew, but nobody knew how often a man used his frank. He himself had been censured for franking a few tons of pig-iron from Washington to Nevada. But no amount of postage-stamps would have carried it.
Mr. DRAKE referred to the darkest hour of the late war, when postage-stamps were current, and when, if the proposed changes were effected, they could have made the Post-Office department pay for their drinks. But in the present state of the South, when the Ku-Klux Klan, in spite of his most earnest endeavors, refused to kill anybody, he saw no hope that those golden hours would return. Therefore he thought it best to cleave to his frank.
HOUSE.
Mr. LOGAN desired to expel WHITTEMORE permanently. WHITTEMORE had really gone too far, and if they let him in people would consider that they were no better, and institute investigations of a disagreeable nature into the conduct of Congress generally. Of course the House had a right to expel him. It had a right to expel everybody but himself.
Mr. ELDRIDGE said that directly Mr. LOGAN would be claiming that he--Mr. ELDRIDGE--ought to be expelled. This would be unpleasant to him. He would not die in spring-time.