committee. Four or five of the eleven will contain from fifty to one hundred and ten printed pages each, document size, which fact is sufficient to convey the idea that a position on the appropriation committee, at least, is no sinecure. Indeed the amount of work performed by the average congressman is much greater than is popularly supposed. The work in committee, the daily attendance at the regular sessions, the calls at the departments on official business, the immense private correspondence from clamorous constituents who want a book, or a speech, or an office, all add to the cares and responsibilities of the honorable M. C. Then if his family, if he has one, is desirous of cutting a dash in "Washington society," the poor man is "toted" around to all the balls, pound-parties, lunches and "receptions" given by the notables from Lord A down to Esquire Z, and filled up with frozen cream, boiling coffee, terrapin soup, and iced champagne. He must call on all the officials, high and low, stand the "crush" at the president's reception, and furnish the female interviewer the full particulars concerning the style and cost of his wife's wardrobe.
The preparation of speeches, if he be given to speech-making, requires much care and time on the part of the congressman who aspires to renown in that direction. On all possible subjects connected with legislation the field has been thoroughly gleaned many times over. International and constitutional law, diplomacy, the tariff, internal improvements, and every conceivable subject upon which any considerable number of citizens are supposed to take the slightest interest, has been a matter of public discussion in the two houses of congress ever since their existence. It is not expected, therefore, that, upon general topics, the average member will be able to say anything remarkably new, or strikingly original. He will be fortunate indeed if somebody does not hop up and point him to the volume, page, column, and paragraph in the Record or Globe, of ten, twenty, or forty years ago, where almost his exact language may be found. This strange condition of affairs may be accounted for by the fact that upon certain specific questions of a public nature, the reference to standard works in the congressional libraries are the only reliable data upon which to build the superstructure of a speech. It is not to be wondered at, then, that hundreds of men, searching for the same facts upon the same subject, in the same books, should frequently stumble upon the same paragraph in elucidating their views. Then, again, they must rely on the knowledge and judgment of the librarian, who hunts up the "references" on a given subject. Without the librarian and his assistants, any man would be as helpless as a ship at sea without a rudder. The various libraries in the capitol contain a half-a-million volumes, which is a pile of books the size of which no one would form any adequate idea, who has not seen them. Amid the miles of shelving, and the hundreds of alcoves, one might hunt a year for a certain book and not be able to find it. The librarian, however, with his wonderful system of indexing, and his vast practical knowledge, gained only by years and years of experience, will soon find whatever is needed. Let a member make known his desire to find the decision of a county, state or supreme court upon any case, the opinion of any noted jurist upon any question of law, the cost of keeping a soldier in 1840, the price of army blankets in 1850, the revenue derived from the importation of quinine in 1860, the number of tons of pig-iron produced in Pennsylvania; in short, if he wants any particular information upon any given subject, the old "book worms" in the libraries can produce it for him in an incredibly short space of time. There is a man in the house library who knows it so well that he is regarded as a permanent fixture. He has been discharged once or twice on account of political changes, but soon reinstated. They can't do without him. He has probably contributed indirectly, more pages to the Congressional Record, during the last dozen years, than any man
