Well, perhaps I labour my point too much. It is, after all, not important. The main thing is the simple fact that the average representative from my district is typical of Congress--that, if anything, he is superior to the normal congressman of these, our days. That normal congressman, as year chases year, tends to descend to such depths of puerility, to such abysses of petty shysterism, that he becomes offensive alike to the intelligence and to the nose. His outlook, when it is honest, is commonly childish--and it is very seldom honest. The product of a political system which puts all stress upon the rewards of public office, he is willing to make any sacrifice, of dignity, of principle, of honour, to hold and have those rewards. He has no courage, no intellectual _amour propre_, no ardent belief in anything save his job, and the jobs of his friends. It was easy for Wilson to beat him into line on the war issue; it was easy for the prohibitionists to intimidate and stampede him; it is easy for any resolute man or group of men to do likewise. I read the _Congressional Record_ faithfully, and have done so for years. In the Senate debates, amid oceans of tosh, I occasionally encounter a flash of wit or a gleam of sense; direct elections have not yet done their work. But in the lower house there is seldom anything save a garrulous and intolerable imbecility. The discussion of measures of the utmost importance--bills upon which the security and prosperity of the whole nation depend--is carried on in the manner of the Chautauqua and the rural stump. Entire days go by without a single congressman saying anything as intelligent, say, as the gleams that one sometimes finds in the New York _Herald_, or even in the New York _Times_. The newspapers, unfortunately, give no adequate picture of the business. No American journal reports the daily debates comprehensively, as the debates in the House of Commons are reported by the London _Times_, _Daily Telegraph_, and _Morning Post_. All one hears of, as a rule, is the action taken, and only too often the action taken, even when it is reported fairly, is unintelligible without the antecedent discussion. If any one who reads this wants to know what such a discussion is like, then I counsel him to go to the nearest public library, ask for the _Record_ for 1918, and read the debate in the lower house on the Volstead Act. It was, I believe, an average debate, and on a subject of capital importance. It was, from first to last, almost fabulous in its evasion of the plain issue, its incredible timorousness and stupidity, its gross mountebankery and dishonesty. Not twenty men spoke in it as men of honour and self-respect. Not ten brought any idea into it that was not a silly idea and a stale one.