quietly treated as though unworthy from lack of culture or moral excellence. From the moment that Mr. Giddings had avowed his hostility to slavery, he was not only shut out from the society of which I have spoken, but he was treated with marked incivility and coldness by his fellow-members.”

In 1841 there were not more than a dozen slaveholding members of the house of representatives who recognized Mr. Giddings when they passed him on the street or met him in the hall of the house. How mighty the slave influence upon all the great questions of government was, for a full generation, cannot and will not be here even sketched; but it is pertinent to remark that it never, in the worst days of northern subserviency to slavery, could have begun to be as great in a northern capital as it was in Washington.

Washington in 1800 was a miserable, straggling village, lost in the Potomac wilderness. Washington in 1888 is a city of more than two hundred thousand people, with material improvements second to none in the country. It is a most attractive city, and every day becoming more and more attractive. The population steadily increases. Some of those who flock there go because they are interested in contracts or in official people; some, because it is the National centre of politics; some, because the public business and supplying of the population give employment; some, because the society is very attractive. Scholars and scientific men go because they find there excellent companionship, good collections and admirable libraries. The majority go, no doubt, from a variety of reasons. The "society" that was lacking in 1800 has been abundantly supplied. But relatively the "industry" and "business" are as wanting now as they were then. Save the Georgetown flour, one can think of nothing that Washington sends to the markets of the country. Nor is there any commerce. The people consume but do not produce. Of course there are the exchanges that such a population calls for. A few large fortunes originated in the treasury operations of the War of 1812, of the Mexican war and the Civil war; others originated in government contracts; many fortunes are represented there that originated in other places, but there is not one great fortune that grew up on the spot in manufacturing, in commerce or in transportation. The employés of the government, of all kinds, are fifteen thousand in number; seventy-five thousand men, women and children live directly upon wages paid from the National treasury; and of the one hundred and twenty-five thousand or more who do not live directly upon the treasury, nearly the whole number live upon it

at only one remove-that is, by serving those who serve the government. Accordingly, Washington is a political, an official and a social city.

And yet none of the politics belong to Washington. The city is governed by a board of commissioners appointed by the President and confirmed by the senate. The people vote for nothing; the ballot box is unknown in the District of Columbia. Congress votes the taxes and regulates the appropriations. It may be strange that the capital of the greatest representative government of the world should be in form a tyranny or despotism, but such is the fact, The mental character of the city is also peculiar. Such dependence upon the government cannot be healthy in any way. In the days of political assessments, some men in the departments contributed to the treasuries of both the great political parties. On the change of the National administration, men cry, "Long live the king!" with a unanimity heard nowhere else. Men have not the same kind of interest in politics that they have in Cleveland or Chicago. The newspapers, if published somewhere else than in the National capital, would be unknown one hundred miles away. The writer was in Washington in 1873, when the increase of salaries was enacted by congress. There was no outery, no opposition on the part of the Washington people so far as he could hear. On the other hand he heard much approval, and some complaints because the "raises" had not been greater and more numerous. Larger salaries meant more money to those who received them, brisker trade for the shopkeepers and brighter society. However it may be with the country, Washington is sure to favor liberal appropriations by the government. The most reflective man who has occupied the White House in recent years, in private conversation once spoke of some of these features of Washington society, and remarked that it was often difficult, for these and other reasons, for a President to find out the truth concerning matters of public duty. That public interests have suffered from the peculiar character of the capital city cannot be doubted. Of course a great capital means a large official population and large influence from that quarter. But suppose that this population were simply a constituent of a larger population; suppose that there were present industry and business as well as society and politics; suppose that men representing manufactures, commerce, business, insurance, railroads, steamship companies, etc., were a part of the society that surges around the capitol and the White House, and mingles freely with legislators, judges and executive officers-who

does not see that the social, environment would be much more healthful? Another phase of the subject is touched in the following article:

other

"The difficulty of bringing persons of the Brady-Dorsey type to justice in Washington furnishes one of the strong objections to the practice, to which the country now seems irrevocably committed, of making political capitals, or seats of government, separate from the social and commercial, or, in other words, real capitals of the Nation and the states. The result is not only to isolate the class engaged in the work of legislation and administration from the rest of the country, but, by throwing its members mainly on each for society, to intensify their prejudices and dullness and ignorance. Their mental condition becomes very much that of the garrison of a remote fort, or of the crew of a man-of-war. They get to have an esprit de corps and a morality of their own, and a scale of proportion of their own. Their own controversies assume enormous dimensions in their eyes; the objections of the outside world to practices with which they are familiar seem finical or "Sunday-schoolish," and they secretly resent an attack on a man in office as a sort of impertinence, and make common cause with him, as a soldier might with a professional brother who had got "into trouble "through a youthful escapade. Public opinion is represented to them by the correspondents of distant newspapers, and they are not much troubled by it, because it seems to them to express simply the personal feelings of Smith or Jones of Newspaper Row, whom they know well and don't like. The illustrations of all this, afforded by the senatorial "deadlock" in Washington, and by the action of the assembly at Albany, on the street-cleaning question, are very striking. Neither of them, undoubtedly, would have occurred if the legislators in either case sat in a real capital, and were in contact with the currents of public thought and feeling, and when they left the capital, instead of brooding over their own performances with brother politicians in their hotels and boarding-houses, mingled with men of other callings and occupations, and got glimpses of the great legislative "crises" from the ordinary taxpayer's point of view. Massachusetts is better off in this respect than almost any other Its legislature sits in the moral and social and commercial centre of the state."

state.

We do not know that pious Washingtonians pray with their faces turned to the White House, as Daniel prayed with his face towards *The Nation, May 5, 1881.

Jerusalem; but the White House is more emphatically the centre of Washington than the queen's palace is of London.

We have seen how fearful the fathers were of cities, how determined they were to seclude the National capital from the great civilizing forces of the time; and we have also seen that in carrying out their plan they caused another large city to be built, whose dominant influences are politics, society and officialism. If, instead of the government's directing a city to be laid out in the wilderness, one of the large cities of 1790 had been made the National capital, history would have been different and the National life better.

DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE.

TH

"HE following is the official record of the various steps taken in "the congress of the United Colonies, respecting 'a declaration of independence, by the representatives of the United States of America, in congress assembled:""

Tuesday, June 11, 1776.

Resolved, That the committee for preparing the declaration consist of five-the members chosen, Mr. Jefferson, Mr. John Adams, Mr. Franklin, Mr. Sherman and Mr. R. R. Livingston.

Monday, July 1, 1776.

The order of the day being read, Resolved, That this congress will resolve itself into a committee of the whole, to take into consideration the resolution respecting independence.

That the declaration be referred to said committee.

The congress resolved itself into a committee of the whole. After some time the President resumed the chair, and Mr. Harrison reported that the committee had come to a resolution, which they desired him to report, and to move for leave to sit again.

The resolution agreed to by the committee of the whole being read, the determination thereof was, at the request of a colony, postponed until to-morrow.

Resolved, That this congress will, to-morrow, resolve itself into at committee of the whole, to take into consideration the declaration respecting independence,