Schurz who becomes more and more a "virtuoso" and professional rhetorician (and who is on the stage of the Senate what Wachtel is on the opera stage), knows how to clothe the insults he uses to those present, in a manner that gives him the greatest security against retaliation, and heaps gross abuse only on those who live a thousand miles distant - perhaps an illustration of what the American understands by "Dutch courage." Conkling, Morton, Sumner, Edmunds, Schurz, Nye (who in his specialty, that of the low farce, is as popular a performer as Schurz in his, that of the serious parts), they all vie with each other in degrading the Senate into a beer garden.

Whose fault it has been, that the debates in the Senate have so severely degenerated, is hard to say. Not in Sumner's motion itself, but in the tape-worm like introduction of it lay a challenge to fight that was taken up by Conkling and Morton with regrettable zeal...

Even Schurz regrets in his correspondence with Ledermann's paper in St. Louis, that Mr. Sumner was so "unfortunate" as to accuse the Administration indirectly of fraud in the arms deal, while the difference in figuring that Sumner shouted about has since been satisfactorily explained.

Quite differently the Mouse has behaved! Without an unnecessary word, on the motion of a good Republican, Representative John Lynch of Maine, it has charged its Committee on Military Expenditures to make an investigation... This committee consists of three Republicans and two Democrats; it is, one sees, non-partisan by composition and it went to work without delay. One of the more dependable telegraphic news offices in Washington says in this connection "Everybody here laughs about the defeat of the Senate".