One day in the fall of 1814, after the British had left the city scarred with blackened ruins, Mr. Breckenridge was passing the Octagon house, when he was hailed by Dolly Madison from the doorway.
“When I listened to that threatening sermon of yours,” she exclaimed, “I little thought that its warnings would be realized so soon.”
“Oh, Madam,” he answered, “I trust that the chastening of the Lord may not have been in vain!”
It was, however, as far as any permanent change in the habits of the people was concerned. There was a brief interval of greater sobriety due to the sad plight of the community; then Sunday amusements resumed their sway with as much vigor as of old.
Although to the eye of the casual visitor the Capitol seems so quiet and well-ordered a place that it practically takes care of itself, the truth is that it is continually under pretty rigid surveillance. It has a uniformed corps of special police, whose jurisdiction covers everything within the limits of Capitol Park; besides this, the Superintendent of the Capitol has general oversight of the building, and the officers of the House and Senate look after their respective wings. When Thomas B. Reed of Maine became Speaker, he found the House wing a squatting ground for a small army of petty merchants who had crept in one by one and established booths for the sale of sandwiches and pies, cigars, periodicals, picture cards, and souvenirs, obstructing the highways of communication between one part of the building and another. He proceeded to sweep them all out. There was loud wailing among the ousted, and some who could command a little political influence brought it to bear on him, but in vain; and for more than twenty years thereafter the corridors remained free from these intruders. With the incoming of the Sixty-third Congress, however, discipline began to relax, and, unless the House acquires another Speaker with Mr. Reed’s notions of propriety and the force of will to compel obedience, we shall probably see the hucksters camping once more on the old trail.
Outside of the building the rules are as well enforced as inside. When Coxey’s Army of the Commonweal marched upon Washington in 1894, its leader advertised his intention to make a speech from the Capitol steps, calling upon Congress to provide work and wages for all the idle laborers in the country. Under the law, no harangue or oration may be delivered anywhere on the Capitol grounds without the express consent of the presiding officers of the two chambers of Congress. Remembering the way the lawmakers had been intimidated by a mob at Philadelphia in the early days of the republic, neither the Speaker nor the President of the Senate was willing that Coxey should carry out his plan; and the Capitol police, without violence or display of temper, made short work of the proposed mass meeting. On another occasion, the performers for a moving-picture show attempted to use the steps of the Capitol as a background for a scene in which a man made up to resemble the President of the United States was to play an undignified part; the police pounced down upon the company, confiscating the apparatus and escorting the actors to the nearest station-house. A like fate befel an automobilist who, on a wager, tried to drive his machine up the steps of the main portico. Occasionally a bicycler, ambitious to descend this staircase at full speed, has proved too quick-witted for the officers, but as a rule they are at hand when needed.