become the workshop of Senator Hanway. Now, on the brink of a new
Congress, one which would be in session when the nominating convention
of his party was called to order and therefore might be supposed to own
power over its action and the Presidential ticket it would put up,
Senator Hanway resolved to add the House of Representatives to his
machine. He would elect its Speaker, and make the House an annex to his
workshop of a Senate. He would hook up House and Senate as a coachman
hooks up his team, and driving them tandem or abreast as the exigencies
of the hour suggested, see how far two such powerful agencies might take
him on his White House road.

It was on the side of Senator Hanway a brilliant thought and a daring
one, this plan to seize a Speakership and apply it to his personal
fortunes; for your Speakership is that office second only to a
Presidency, and comes often to be the latter's superior in practical
force. Those wise ones who designed the government intended the House of
Representatives to be a republic. Through its own groveling abjections,
however, it long ago sunk to an autocracy with the Speaker in the rôle
of autocrat. It sold its birthright for no one knows what mess of
pottage to pass its slavish days beneath a tyranny of the gavel. The
Speaker settles all things. No measure is proposed, no bill passes, no
member speaks except by the Speaker's will. He constructs the committees
and selects their chairmen and lays out their work. With a dozen
members, every one of whom votes and acts beneath his thumb, the Speaker
transacts the story of the House. So far as the other three hundred and
forty odd members are concerned, the folk who sent them might as well
have written a letter. They live as much without art or part or lot in
planning and executing House affairs as do the caged menagerie animals
in the planning and execution of the affairs of what show they happen to
exist as the attractions. These caged ones of the House are never