But for the men there were other forms of amusement, popular in their day. The racing on the National Course near the city made it difficult to maintain a quorum in Congress, and the statesmen mounted their horses to ride to the track to cheer their favorites and to bet their money. Even the President entered his horses and lost heavily on his wagers. There Jackson and a goodly portion of the Cabinet, and a formidable sprinkling of the leaders of the Opposition from Clay to Letcher, might be seen backing their judgment as to horseflesh with their purses. And when it was not horse-racing, it was cockfighting, with the President entering his own birds from the Hermitage, and riding with his friends to Bladensburg to witness the humiliation of his entries. It was a day of gambling, when statesmen, whose names children are now taught to reverence, played for heavy stakes for days and nights at a time, with Clay and Poindexter losing fortunes, and an occasional victim of the lure blowing out his brains. While most of the celebrities played in private houses, they could, if they preferred, find the notorious gambling-houses along the Avenue. Along with racing, cockfighting, and gambling went heavy drinking. “Since I have been here,” wrote Horace Binney, after two years in Congress, “one man, an habitual drunkard, blew out his brains; two have died notorious drunkards, and one of them shamefully immoral. The honors are given to all, with equal eulogy and ceremonial.”[70] The statesman of the Thirties who did not drink heavily was a rarity. Just as whiskey, brandy, gin, and wine were served in great decanters on the tables at hotels, “at the boarding-houses every guest had his bottle or interest in a bottle.”[71] On the way to the Capitol, the statesman could quench his thirst at numerous bars--and often did. And in the basement of the Capitol building whiskey could be had. Never in American history have so many promising careers been wrecked by drunkenness as during the third decade. Frequently national celebrities would appear upon the floor of the House or Senate in a state of intoxication, and on at least one occasion the greater part of the house was hilariously drunk.[72] Thus, despite the miry streets, the drabness and rusticity, the Washington of the Jacksonian period was easily the gayest, the most brilliant and dissipated community in the country. A penetrating observer found, in its recklessness and extravagance, a striking similarity to the spirit of the eighteenth century in England, as portrayed in Thackeray’s “Humorists,” with “laxity of morals and the coolest disregard possible.”[73] Its superior social charm was due to the fact that it was “the only place in the Union where people consider it necessary to be agreeable--where pleasing, as in the Old World, becomes a sort of business, and the enjoyments of social intercourse enter into the habitual calculations of every one.”[74] A goodly portion of the women of good society, and other