One of the most youthful members of the government’s gravest and most august legislative body is Senator Joseph W. Bailey, a typical representative of the biggest, the breeziest and the most untrammeled, if not the most patriotic and progressive commonwealth in the Union. A natural leader, an orator of plausibility and power and a politician of resource and acumen, he is besides admittedly one of the ablest constitutional lawyers in public life. Though a native of Mississippi and a legal product of Cumberland University, Tennessee, Senator Bailey is a Texan seemingly to the manner born. He looks, speaks, thinks and feels Texas, and having won his spurs so creditably in the congressional jousts his people have gratefully recognized his talents by entrusting him with the higher responsibilities of senator. While Senator Bailey is a virile product of the present and coming generation in the South he has not been inclined to relinquish the habits, dress and thought of the passing regime and his picturesque personality is doubtless as readily recognized by resident of and visitor to Washington as any other public character of the times. In no particular do his old-school propensities more emphatically display themselves than in his native love for rural life and natural objects. His chief hobby comprises the maintenance of an expansive estate whereon he rears the sportive thoroughbred, so dear to the heart of the rural Southerner, and whereon he spends in the open very much of his leisure time. Senator Bailey is a close student of men, politics and affairs, and is of the South, social, though he has no taste for the conventional society of the city. James D. Porter. For nearly half a century has the Honorable James D. Porter figured eminently but modestly as a public servant politically, civilly and commercially. A native of Tennessee, in which State he has spent nearly all of his eventful life, he was born at Paris, in 1828, and was admitted to the bar in 1859. With a disposition toward the public service, from a State legislator he became a circuit judge, and from the bench he ascended to the gubernatorial chair, which he was twice called upon to occupy. His large and worthy talents coming to the notice of President Cleveland, he was invited during his first term to serve as Assistant Secretary of State, which he did with such satisfaction as to receive during the President’s second term his credentials as the government’s official representative to Chili, in which capacity he attracted attention by his tactful reestablishment of friendly relations between the two countries. In the active commercial affairs of life he has been likewise prominent, being sometime president of the Nashville, Chattanooga and St. Louis Railroad Company, and as a soldier of the gray he gallantly participated in many of the fiercest conflicts of the war as Adjutant General under General Frank Cheatham. [Illustration: