Speech #590062669

I would not be understood as saying that they were irrelevant to matters deeply affecting the public welfare and vividly before the public mind. With hardly an exception they all turned upon questions of vital and pressing political importance. yet hardly one touched a subject with which the House will be suffered to deal. Sitting In Coinmittee of the Whole House to consider a bill making appropriation for the support of the PostOffice Department we have had addresses on the tariff. on immigration. on denaturized alcohol. and on many other subjects entirely remote from the subject before us and wholly unconnected with each other. If years from now some student should undertake to study the RECORD which chronicles our proceedings he would be driven to the conclusion that while nearly every one of those speeches taken by itself was of such excellence that it might have been addressed to a council of sages. yet the whole debate taken togather suggested the incoherence. discordance. and dissonance of a lunatic asylum rather than the debate of a highly intelligent. deliberative body. Mr.