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 mails and tireless tongues of telegraphy bring every constituency within easy earshot of Washington; and it therefore seeks to confine what little discussion it indulges in to the few committee-men specially in charge of the business of each moment. But the Senate is small and of settled habits, and has no such bugbear to trouble it. It can afford to do without any clôture or previous question. No Senator is likely to want to speak on all the topics of the session, or to prepare more speeches than can conveniently be spoken before adjournment is imperatively at hand. The House can be counted upon to waste enough time to leave some leisure to the upper chamber.

And there can be no question that the debates which take place every session in the Senate are of a very high order of excellence. The average of the ability displayed in its discussions not infrequently rises quite to the level of those controversies of the past which we are wont to call great because they furnished occasion to men like Webster and Calhoun and Clay, whom we cannot now quite match in mastery of knowledge and of eloquence. If the debates of the present are smothered amongst the innumerable folios of the “Record,” it is not because they do not contain utterances worthy to be heeded and to gain currency, but because they do not deal with