The architects had a candidate ready because Mr. Wood was practically an engineer; to meet this and yet give a faithful man his due, the name of the position was changed to that of Superintendent of the Capitol. He, like his predecessor, has much to do in getting rid of the foreign artists’ effects and in Americanizing the whole. [Illustration: PLAN OF THE PRINCIPAL FLOOR OF THE CAPITOL (Rooms numbered are for committees, etc.) ] Mrs. Mary Clemmer Ames says of the Capitol: “It not only borrowed its face from the buildings of antiquity, but it was built by men strangers in thought and spirit to the genius of the new republic, and to the unwrought and unembodied poetry of its virgin soil. Its earlier decorators, all Italians, overlaid its walls with their florid colors and foreign symbols; within the American Capitol they have set the Loggia of Raphael, the voluptuous anterooms of Pompeii, and the baths of Titus. The American plants, birds, and animals, representing prodigal nature at home, are buried in twilight passages, while mythological barmaids, misnamed goddesses, dance in the most conspicuous and preposterous places.” An Art Commission was appointed as early as 1859 to decide on all artistic decorations, and it has done much. More remains to make the Capitol, like the Library of Congress, the highest exponent of the thought, taste, and artistic execution of the period which produced it. IV INTERIOR OF THE CAPITOL In 1808 Jefferson made Benjamin Henry Latrobe supervising architect of what we now call the old Capitol, being the central portion of the present building. He constructed the original Senate Chamber, now the Supreme Court Room, on the plan of the old Greek theater, the general outline of which it yet retains. The House (now Statuary Hall) also had a decidedly Grecian aspect. It was finished in 1811. Statuary Hall is semicircular in shape, and has a vaulted roof. Its ornamentation is not yet completed. This is right. It would not be well to occupy all the space in one generation. We need the perspective of time to know that which will be of permanent interest to the world. Here Clay presided, here Webster spoke, and here Adams stood for the right of petition and for the abolition of human slavery. What pictures these scenes would make! A plate in the floor southwest of the center marks the spot in the House where John Quincy Adams fell stricken with paralysis. In a room opening from the Hall is a memorial bust, whose inscription reads: “John Quincy Adams, who, after fifty years of public service, the last sixteen in yonder Hall, was summoned to die in this room February 23, 1848.”