amount of college training which its members had received.[1] There were 11 senators and 19 representatives who were graduates of colleges, and in addition to these, 12 senators and 19 representatives who had had more or less of academic training. Harvard was represented in the Senate by four graduates; Princeton, three; Yale, one; Oxford, one; and Cambridge, one. Nine of the representatives were graduates of Harvard; three, Yale; and three, Princeton. A comparison of the first Congress with the fifty-seventh[2] as regards the number of college graduates in each is interesting and curious, but may not prove very enlightening because of the uncertainty as to the content of different college curriculums. In the first Senate 42 per cent of the members, and in the last 35 per cent were graduates of colleges. The percentages in each of the two houses figures out the same, 29. In the fifty-seventh Congress twenty-one members had attended Yale, to eleven, Harvard, apparently indicating a reversal of the relative weight of the two colleges in the legislative halls of the nation.
In the first elections the voting was either viva voce or by ballot, both methods being common at this time.[3] Maryland and Virginia voted viva voce; and New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina used the ballot. The court house was a favorite voting place in the South, and the town house in New England. In South Carolina the parish church was much used. Polling places were com-
- ↑ Appleton, Cyclopedia of American Biography. No member is counted as a graduate unless so recorded, no matter if the total number of years of his college training exceeds four.
- ↑ Congressional Director for Fifty-seventh Congress.
- ↑ American Historical Review, Schouler, 665-674; Lalor, Cyclopedia, I, 198.
