Page:The Galaxy, Volume 5.djvu/812



jocund air of May tinkles with marriage bells. June is the month of the honeymoon—the era of nuptial tours, of trans-Atlantic tours, of travel domestic and foreign invasion. This is the epoch when on the road, say, from Trenton Falls to Niagara, from Niagara to Montreal, from Montreal to Lake George, you encounter now and again a young lady in a suit of grey, matched from gloves to gaiters, not loquacious, but blissful, protected by a young gentleman who perpetually pulls the car-blinds up and down, arranges shawls, runs for glasses of water, and does not read the paper. I wonder if the shocking device of the "bridal-room" is discarded in steamboats and hotels—an apartment conspicuously labelled "Bridal," and nearest the clattering steamboat paddles; with an extra-sized tag "Bridal" dangling from its door-key; decorated with gaudy stucco-work, emblematic of hymen, and gilt cupids and roses.

Foreign travel is now at high tide, and the ocean steamers are black with their deck-loads as the huge wheels daily chum the Bay of New York into foam. Americans now go to Paris and astound everybody, including themselves, by extravagance. Newspaper writers there are mortified by the reckless expenditures of their countrymen, and gossip over them. A kindlier philosophy accepts this as a provision of Providence for the circulation of wealth. The Paris jewellers and Lyons weavers do not grumble, and, let us patriotically hope, will one day regard Americans as every Swiss regards an Englishman—as the highest type of humanity. A wise Roman had (or ought to have had, I forget which) a prayer against becoming preposterously rich; our wiser Americans will run the risk, trusting to Paris to draw off any dangerous surplus.

Two political declarations, lately made by the Leader of the House, are freighted with unusual significance. Men are not always to be held strictly to account for words spoken under excitement, or theories struck out in the fervor of debate. But the doctrinal expression to which I refer was deliberate, being repeated in two written addresses, and hence not the hasty opinion of oral controversy. In the speech with which Mr. Stevens closed the great House debate on impeachment, and which Mr. McPherson read, occurred these words:

Was it a slip of the pen which announced this new and ominous doctrine that the sovereign power of the nation rests on Congress? Not at all. In the same Congressman's written argument in the Senate Chamber, upon the trial of the President, he said:

Were this extraordinary theory regarding the foundation stone of our national polity the vagary of some man of inferior brain, inferior will, or insignificant position, it might better be suffered to pass unnoticed, since, in the intense glare of the grand impeachment, it would be eclipsed and forgotten. But it is the measured and repeated utterance, in a solemn procedure, of a