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as far as I could judge, was the position of Congress in the early months of 1862; and that, under existing circumstances, was perhaps the only possible position that it could fill. All this to me was very melancholy. The streets of Washington were always full of soldiers. Mounted sentries stood at the corners of all the streets with drawn sabers--shivering in the cold and besmeared with mud. A military law came out that civilians might not ride quickly through the street. Military riders galloped over one at every turn, splashing about through the mud, and reminding one not unfrequently of John Gilpin. Why they always went so fast, destroying their horses' feet on the rough stones, I could never learn. But I, as a civilian, given as Englishmen are to trotting, and furnished for the time with a nimble trotter, found myself harried from time to time by muddy men with sabers, who would dash after me, rattling their trappings, and bid me go at a slower pace. There is a building in Washington, built by private munificence and devoted, according to an inscription which it bears, "To the Arts." It has been turned into an army clothing establishment. The streets of Washington, night and day, were thronged with army wagons. All through the city military huts and military tents were to be seen, pitched out among the mud and in the desert places. Then there was the chosen locality of the teamsters and their mules and horses--a wonderful world in itself; and all within the city! Here horses and mules lived--or died--sub dio, with no slightest apology for a stable over them, eating their provender from off the wagons to which they were fastened. Here, there, and everywhere large houses were occupied as the headquarters of some officer, or the bureau of some military official. At Washington and round Washington the army was everything. While this was so, is it to be conceived that Congress should ask questions about military matters with success? All this, as I say, filled me with sorrow. I hate military belongings, and am disgusted at seeing the great affairs of a nation put out of their regular course. Congress to me is respectable. Parliamentary debates--be they ever so prosy, as with us, or even so rowdy, as sometimes they have been with our cousins across the water--engage my sympathies. I bow inwardly before a Speaker's chair, and look upon the elected representatives of any nation as the choice men of the age. Those muddy, clattering dragoons, sitting at the corners of the streets with dirty woolen comforters around their ears, were to me hideous in the extreme. But there at Washington, at the period of which I am writing, I was forced to acknowledge that Congress was at a discount, and that the rough-shod generals were the men of the day. "Pack them up and send them in boxes to their several States." It would come to that, I thought, or to something like that, unless Congress would consent to be submissive. "I have yet to learn--!" said indignant members, stamping with their feet on the floor of the House. One would have said that by that time the lesson might almost have been understood. Up to the period of this civil war Congress has certainly worked well for the United States. It might be easy to pick holes in it; to show that some members have been corrupt, others quarrelsome, and others again impracticable. But when we look at the circumstances under which it has been from year to year elected; when we remember the position of the newly populated States from which the members have been sent, and the absence throughout the country of that old traditionary class of Parliament men on whom we depend in England; when we think how recent has been the elevation in life of the majority of those who are and must be elected, it is impossible to deny them praise for intellect, patriotism, good sense, and diligence. They began but sixty years ago, and for sixty years Congress has fully answered the purpose for which it was established. With no antecedents of grandeur, the nation, with its Congress, has made