The Portland daily press. [volume] (Portland, Me.) 1862-1921, 1875-01-18
Dinners and the Lobby.

Mr.. Samuel Ward, who is known in Wash
statements before the Ways and Means Com
mittee in regard to the working of the
'myth" which are interesting and instruct
i've. We trust Mr.. Ward will write a book,
not to please his enemies, but to delight and
instruct posterity and to preserve from OBJ
livion those valuable methods of managing
congressman with which he favored the COM
mittee. Our children may want subsidies
for the great European and American Bal
loon Mail Company or some corporation OF
that nature, and the experience of the vet
eran lobbyist will be of great benefit to them.
Entertainments, he says, and by entertain
ments he appears to mean dinners, play an
important part in lobbying. There is nothing
in the world, Mr.. Ward sententously remarks,
and we are disposed to agree with him here,
so good as entertainments of refined order.
Parodyng the famous remark of Talleyrand
he told the amused committeeman that lob
bying is assisted by good dinners. But, ,adds the
cautious Mr.. Ward, the entertainments must
be proportioned to the business of the session
when the business is good, so are the enter
tainments; and when the business is not
good the entertainments are meagre. This
neat sentence deserves a place as motto on
the title-page of the "golden book" of the
lobbyist. 1t has all the characteristics of a
proverb, which Lord Russell has defined to
be the wit of one and the wisdom of many.
Or better it will rank as maxim, for max
inns, Lord Brougham tells us, are the con-
densed good sense of nations, and this enter
tainment dictum is certainly an expression
reduced to its lowest terms, of the condensed
good sense of lobbyists.
The assiduous magazine reader who puts
faith in Mr.. James Parton's famous state
ment that the lobby is myth, will very nat
urally suppose, and the supposition is rigid
ly logical one, that these entertainments are
Barmecide feasts. Quite the contrary is the
case. From the oysters and lemon juice 20 the
coffee and brandy burnt sugar the viands are Of
ahighly substantial character, alike pleasing to
the palate and satisfying to the stomach. Oh
course there are grades in the dinners. One
does not waste choice wines on man who
prefers old red-eye, and it is obviously eX-
travagant and uncalled for to place blue points
before the member from the inland states
who is unable to distinguish the delicate BIZ
valves from the common Virginia plant. II
is easy to imagine that the Southern Repre-
sentative, whose ideal of high living is an un.
limited amount of bacon and corn-pone
would be less exactlng as to his fare than the
New Yorker whose palate has been de
baucheG by much sitting at aldermanic feast;
aad civic banquets, and who has learned tc
Low low pate de foie gras without shudder
But suppos!tions o: this sort are proftless
| The menu can be safely left in the hands o
so accomplished an artist as Mr.. Sam WarC
has proved himself to be.
1t is natural to suppose that to the lobbyist
| life is one long feast, saddened only by thu
limited capacity of the hnman stomach
| (Which unfortunately holds but three pint
when moderately distended) and by the ma
tonal liability to dyspepsia. Here we err
| Mr.. Ward informs US, through the committee
that the business of lobbying is as precariou
| as fishing In the Hebrides, and that the dis
| app )intments are much more numerous than
the successes. We feel confident that thC
| failures are not to be attributed to Mr.. Ware
nor to his capital dinners, and that ii there
| be congressman who fail to be moved By his
| entertainments it must be attributed to thu
obtuseness OF the gustatory nerves or 10 a
arrangement of the digestive apparatus con
sequent on indulgence in unlimited pie in The
| days of their youth