she makes you pay in advance for it.  That is what you will get for pretending to be a member of Congress.  If you had been content to be merely a private citizen, your trunk would have been sufficient security for your board.  If you are curious and inquire into this thing, the chances are that your landlady will be ill-natured enough to say that the person and property of a Congressman are exempt from arrest or detention, and that with the tears in her eyes she has seen several of the people’s representatives walk off to their several States and Territories carrying her unreceipted board bills in their pockets for keepsakes.  And before you have been in Washington many weeks you will be mean enough to believe her, too.

Of course you contrive to see everything and find out everything.  And one of the first and most startling things you find out is, that every individual you encounter in the City of Washington almost—­and certainly every separate and distinct individual in the public employment, from the highest bureau chief, clear down to the maid who scrubs Department halls, the night watchmen of the public buildings and the darkey boy who purifies the Department spittoons—­represents Political Influence.  Unless you can get the ear of a Senator, or a Congressman, or a Chief of a Bureau or Department, and persuade him to use his “influence” in your behalf, you cannot get an employment of the most trivial nature in Washington.  Mere merit, fitness and capability, are useless baggage to you without “influence.”  The population of Washington consists pretty much entirely of government employee and the people who board them.  There are thousands of these employees, and they have gathered there from every corner of the Union and got their berths through the intercession (command is nearer the word) of the Senators and Representatives of their respective States.  It would be an odd circumstance to see a girl get employment at three or four dollars a week in one of the great public cribs without any political grandee to back her, but merely because she was worthy, and competent, and a good citizen of a free country that “treats all persons alike.”  Washington would be mildly thunderstruck at such a thing as that.  If you are a member of Congress, (no offence,) and one of your constituents who doesn’t know anything, and does not want to go into the bother of learning something, and has no money, and no employment, and can’t earn a living, comes besieging you for help, do you say, “Come, my friend, if your services were valuable you could get employment elsewhere—­don’t want you here?” Oh, no:  You take him to a Department and say, “Here, give this person something to pass away the time at—­and a salary”—­and the thing is done.  You throw him on his country.  He is his country’s child, let his country support him.  There is something good and motherly about Washington, the grand old benevolent National Asylum for the Helpless.