Every one complained, all suffered; members, senators, the President, and the cabinet, all were having dust flung in their eyes, at a period when the commonwealth required that they should all be most especially keen and clearsighted. The Potomac, meantime, swept by them, clear and cool, and the classic Tiber could with difficulty be kept out of their houses. The Romans would have made their Tiber useful on such an occasion, and the ready remedy at length suggested itself to the half-smothered senators. The sum of a few hundred dollars was promptly voted to abate the evil, in conjunction with the Tiber, whose contribution was here on demand. The bill was, however, rejected on its farther course: the dust continued to rise, the people saved their dollars, their representatives continued blind, and the banks of the Tiber remained undrawn on. If you venture an observation upon this obvious absence of all decent pride in their capital, as being somewhat singular in a people who seem wrapt in their country, and solicitous that it should show worthily in the world's eyes, the case is admitted, and accounted for readily enough, but by no means creditably, in my mind. The members from Louisiana or Maine will tell you that they cannot satisfactorily account to their constituents for voting sums of money to adorn or render convenient a city these may never see, and for whose very existence they have no care. The man from the great western valley will shrug up his shoulders at your observation, admit its truth, but add, that the idea of the continuance of Washington, as the metropolis of the Union, and seat of the general government, is a ridicule, since this ought clearly to wait upon the tide of population, and be situated west of the Alleghanies. Neither of these answers are worthy the country or the American people: the citizen voters of these distant states should be reminded that the district of Columbia is their common property, and Washington the capital of their great Union, representing them in the eyes of strangers, and from whose present condition the least prejudiced European will find it difficult to avoid drawing injurious conclusions. Without internal resources, and entirely dependent upon the government, it would be worthy their national grandeur to make this district a type of that grandeur; and its city, as far as all public buildings and general conveniences might be concerned, second to none in the world. Presuming even its occupation to be temporary, and that, at no distant period, it will be deserted, left again to the dominion of nature, to be once more incorporated with the forest,--why, a Russian boyard has raised as fine a city, to lodge his royal mistress in for one night, and set it on fire to light her home on the next after!