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early Congresses had time to talk; Congresses of to-day have not. Before that wing of the Capitol was built in which the representative chamber now is, the House used to sit in the much smaller room, now empty save for the statuary to whose exhibition it is devoted; and there much speech-making went on from day to day; there Calhoun and Randolph and Webster and Clay won their reputations as statesmen and orators. So earnest and interesting were the debates of those days, indeed, that the principal speeches delivered in Congress seem to have been usually printed at length in the metropolitan journals.^[1] But the number and length of the speeches was even then very much deplored; and so early as 1828 a writer in the “North American Review” condemns what he calls “the habit of congressional debating,” with the air of one who speaks against some abuse which every one acknowledges to be a nuisance.^[2] Eleven years later a contributor to the “Democratic Review”^[3] declared that it had “been gravely charged upon” Mr. Samuel Cushman, then a member of the Twenty-fifth Congress from New Plampshire, “that he moves the previous question. Truly,” continues the essayist, “he

1. No. Am. Rev., vol. xxvi., p. 162.
2. Id., the same article.
3. “Glances at Congress,” Dem. Rev., March, 1839.