Democratic Sentinel, Volume 17, Number 40, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 20 October 1893 — LIKE A PAINTED SHIP. [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

LIKE A PAINTED SHIP.

SENATORIAL TORPOR THAT IS IDYLLIC. Expense of Maintaining the Senatorial Aggregation—What It Costs to Feed the Senate Animals and Clean Out the Senate Cages—Congressional Proceedings. May Now Do Something. Washington correspondence:

THE United States Senate has done nothing’ up to the time this letter is , written, and that august body has feN"' been doing this ||a nothing in its cussSjl ternary grave and ms* owlish fa-hion. The Senate is a blight, mildew, a moth rr-|T3Sjto feed on the warp and woof of men's rf*' l -hopes: a quicksand to engulf a nation’s It Mil,,-., destiny, a bacillus, 111| Na paralysis. It in' toils not, neither ’ docs it spin.

As idle as a painted ship Upon a painted ocean. What a toothless humbug the Senate is. One has to chop up its meat for it. Do you know how much money the Senate has wasted while “deliberating* 1 and chasing the stock board up and down the stairs of value? Do you know ’ how much it c< sts to feed the Senate animals and clean out the Senate cages? There should be eightyeight Senators. There are only eightyfive—three shy. Senators Come High. Well, it costs Uncle Sam $5,000 a year to have a Senator. In most instances he isn’t worth it, but he gets it just the same. That’s $440,000. Now for doorkeepers, flunkies, pages, roustabouts, deckhands, and all that long list of tax-eaters that make up the train of greatness, Uncle Sam pays just about $440,000 more—about sßßt'»,000 a year. It falls out, then, that the last two months of idleness have cost the country almost $150,000. Pretty steep price to pay for such a case of typhus fever as the Senate. But it seems to be really on the brink of something. The Senate as a disaster will take a new form. For ten days Senators and all sorts of philosophers in statecraft have besieged Cleveland. They have been telling him that the White House has been cleaned cut, that on the proposition of unconditional reneal it was a whipped and “ busted ” community. They told Cleveland that he had better realize this, doff his hat to fate, limber up his artillery, order his bugles to blow the retreat, and leave the field. They pointed out that Washington retreated through seven rev' lutionary years and now owned a white marble monument 550 sky-piercing feet high.