Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. II.djvu/402

Rh with the Quakers, and the life of the inward light, in good and benevolent institutions. I read the Declaration of Independence, the great charter of liberty of the American people, in the hall where it was signed, and proceeded onward to Washington, to watch the combat in Congress on the subject of the great contested question between the free and the slave States, between the North and the South, relative to the admission of California and New Mexico as free States into the Union. It was carried on with great violence, and the stability of the Union was threatened every day. You know already, through the newspapers, the compromise which was made, and which pacified the strife for a time; for the strife and the danger still exist, secretly or openly, so long as slavery and slaves are to be found within the American Union, and the stronger grows the human and the political consciousness of this country, the more keen will become the struggle to concentrate itself on this point, the fiercer will become the warfare.

I saw great statesmen and heard great speeches in Washington, and I believe that no country on earth can, at this time, present an assembly of greater talent or of more remarkable men than may be met with in the Senate of the United States. Political injustice and political bitterness I found here, as everywhere, on the political battle-field.

That which struck me most in the Congress of the United States, was the mode of representation. You know something of it from books and newspapers; each state, small or large in the Union, sends two senators to Congress. These constitute the Senate, or upper house. The representatives who constitute the second chamber, or lower house, are sent by each separate state, according to the number of its population; the larger the population the more representatives to Congress. Each individual state of the Union governs itself in the same manner by two chambers, a senate and house of