In all
such cases the price paid for the treaty was paid wholly to the
Senate, and amounted to nothing very serious except in waste of
time and wear of strength. "Life is so gay and horrid!" laughed
Hay; "the Major will have promised all the consulates in the
service; the Senators will all come to me and refuse to believe
me dis-consulate; I shall see all my treaties slaughtered, one by
one, by the thirty-four per cent of kickers and strikers; the
only mitigation I can foresee is being sick a good part of the
time; I am nearing my grand climacteric, and the great culbute is
approaching."
He was thinking of his friend Blaine, and might have thought of
all his predecessors, for all had suffered alike, and to Adams as
historian their sufferings had been a long delight -- the
solitary picturesque and tragic element in politics --
incidentally requiring character-studies like Aaron Burr and
William B. Giles, Calhoun and Webster and Sumner, with Sir
Forcible Feebles like James M. Mason and stage exaggerations like
Roscoe Conkling. The Senate took the place of Shakespeare, and
offered real Brutuses and Bolingbrokes, Jack Cades, Falstaffs,
and Malvolios -- endless varieties of human nature nowhere else
to be studied, and none the less amusing because they killed, or
because they were like schoolboys in their simplicity.
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