"It is only occasionally that I go to the committee meetings to make a quorum to act on important business. I do not attend them one day more than I am obliged to, for I am quite sure it is not my duty unless charged with a certain subject. This whole machinery is a means of transferring the legislation of the country from those to whose hands the constitution commits it to irresponsible juntas.... I say general standing committees, without any exception, are great nuisances, and they ought to be abolished.... They are not proper bodies to exercise legislative powers. They are not known in the country from which we derive our institutions. The English have no standing committees. They raise special committees on special objects."[100] February 18, 1859. "The general business of the country," as he expressed it, January 10, 1859, that was his concern. Each subject requiring the action of the senate, whether important or trivial, received his industrious attention, as his course and language on the floor always show; and he evidently feels it his duty to furnish the body on all questions the utmost instruction and aid that he can possibly give. He had no ambition to be the author of novel measures--he was strenuous only to bestow upon every subject of current legislation the proper consideration. His premeditated efforts are but few. He never shows any distrust of his offhand faculty. He takes part in nearly all the discussions, often being up several times the same day on the same subject. He is seldom lengthy, hardly ever away from the point needing explanation, and never, never dull. Generally he comes with correcting fact or enlightening principle, and it is seldom that his matter and words are not both impressive. I found it well in writing the Life mentioned above to present the most of his senatorial course by assorting his utterances under their proper heads, with the briefest possible comment, rather than to narrate chronologically in the common way of biographers. In his speeches it is only now and then that he is steadily progressive as he was in the Iowa contested election case. His advocacy or opposition is generally founded upon a principle, and from this principle--usually central and self-evident--the different passages radiate in aphorisms, self-supporting paragraphs, and detached arguments,--this common radiation being their only connection. Accordingly if you know what is the particular subject that is under discussion, a part taken at random anywhere from any of his extempore speeches is nearly always complete in itself and fully intelligible. Therefore we can have him to give in his own words, in a comparatively small space, an approximately full collection of the rich and varied teachings of his senatorial career, although our chrestomathy would appear to one putting it beside the unmutilated report of the _Globe_ as a beggarly and jejune abstract.