Page:The Siege of London, The Pension Beaurepas, and The Point of View (Boston, James R. Osgood & Co., 1883).djvu/300

290 The people here are more conscious of things; they invent, they act, they answer for themselves; they are not (I speak of social matters) tied up by authority and precedent. We shall have all the Titians by and by, and we shall move over a few cathedrals. You had better stay here if you want to have the best. Of course, I am a roaring Yankee; but you 'll call me that if I say the least, so I may as well take my ease and say the most. Washington's a most entertaining place; and here at least, at the seat of government, one is n't overgoverned. In fact, there 's no government at all to speak of; it seems too good to be true. The first day I was here I went to the Capitol, and it took me ever so long to figure to myself that I had as good a right there as any one else,—that the whole magnificent pile (it is magnificent by the way) was in fact my own. In Europe one does n't rise to such conceptions, and my spirit had been broken in Europe. The doors were gaping wide—I walked all about; there were no door-keepers, no officers, nor flunkeys,—not even a policeman to be seen. It seemed strange not to see a uniform, if only as a patch of color. But this is n't government by livery. The absence of these things is odd at first; you seem to miss something, to fancy the machine has stopped. It has n't, though; it only works without fire and smoke. At the end of three days, this simple negative impression—the fact is that there are no soldiers nor spies, nothing but plain black coats—begins to affect the imagination,