It Is A
Common Thing For Senators To Be Re-Elected, And Thus To Remain In
The House For Twelve And Eighteen Years.
In our Parliament the
House of Commons has greater political strength and wider political
action than the House of
Lords; but in Congress the Senate counts
for more than the House of Representatives in general opinion.
Money bills must originate in the House of Representatives, but that
is, I think, the only special privilege attaching to the public
purse which the Lower House enjoys over the Upper. Amendments to
such bills can be moved in the Senate; and all such bills must pass
the Senate before they become law. I am inclined to think that
individual members of the Senate work harder than individual
Representatives. More is expected of them, and any prolonged
absence from duty would be more remarked in the Senate than in the
other House. In our Parliament this is reversed. The payment made
to members of the Senate is 3000 dollars, or 600l., per annum, and
to a Representative, 500l. per annum. To this is added certain
mileage allowance for traveling backward and forward between their
own State and the Capitol. A Senator, therefore, from California or
Oregon has not altogether a bad place; but the halcyon days of
mileage allowances are, I believe, soon to be brought to an end. It
is quite within rule that the Senator of to-day should be the
Representative of to-morrow. Mr. Crittenden, who was Senator from
Kentucky, is now a member of the Lower House from an electoral
district in that State. John Quincy Adams went into the House of
Representatives after he had been President of the United States.
Divisions in the Senate do not take place as in the House of
Representatives. The ayes and noes are called for in the same way;
but if a poll be demanded, the Clerk of the House calls out the
names of the different Senators, and makes out lists of the votes
according to the separate answers given by the members. The mode is
certainly more dignified than that pursued in the other House, where
during the ceremony of voting the members look very much like sheep
being passed into their pens.
I heard two or three debates in the House of Representatives, and
that one especially in which, as I have said before, a chapter was
read out of the Book of Joshua. The manner in which the Creator's
name and the authority of His Word was banded about the house on
that occasion did not strike me favorably. The question originally
under debate was the relative power of the civil and military
authority. Congress had desired to declare its ascendency over
military matters, but the army and the Executive generally had
demurred to this, - not with an absolute denial of the rights of
Congress, but with those civil and almost silent generalities with
which a really existing power so well knows how to treat a nominal
power.
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