Public servants of higher grade than aldermen or assemblymen sometimes give words a wider meaning than would be found in the dictionary. In many parts of the United States, owing to a curious series of historical associations (which, by the way, it would be interesting to trace), anything foreign and un-English is called “Dutch,” and it was in this sense that a member of a recent Congress used the term when, in speaking in favor of a tariff on works of art, he told of the reluctance with which he saw the productions of native artists exposed to competition “with Dutch daubs from Italy”; a sentence pleasing alike from its alliteration and from its bold disregard of geographic trivialties. Often an orator of this sort will have his attention attracted by some high-sounding word, which he has not before seen, and which he treasures up to use in his next rhetorical flight, without regard to the exact meaning. There was a laboring man’s advocate in the last Legislature, one of whose efforts attracted a good deal of attention from his magnificent heedlessness of technical accuracy in the use of similes. He was speaking against the convict contract-labor system, and wound up an already sufficiently remarkable oration with the still more startling ending that the system “was a vital cobra which was swamping the lives of the laboring men.” Now, he had evidently carefully put together the sentence beforehand, and the process of mental synthesis by which he built it up must have been curious. “Vital” was, of course, used merely as an adjective of intensity; he was a little uncertain in his ideas as to what a “cobra” was, but took it for granted that it was some terrible manifestation of nature, possibly hostile to man, like a volcano, or a cyclone, or Niagara, for instance; then “swamping” was chosen as describing an operation very likely to be performed by Niagara, or a cyclone, or a cobra; and behold, the sentence was complete.