The Opelousas courier., 1886-05-15
A MEMBERS MAIL.
Many Letters Received Daily
by Congressman.
How They are Answered, and tina Quaar
Contents of Some.

carp" says in a Washington letter to
the Cleveland Ohio Leader: The let
tiers received by Con FRESHMEN are of all
kinds, and some of them are very funny.
Your average Congressman gets from ten
to fifty letters a day, and the number
who would do any work upon the great
questions If the country must use q steno-
grapher. Now nearly every member has
his shorthand clerk, who comes to him in
the morning or evening, answers his mail,
and runs about the departments for him.
The Congressman takes a bundle of about
twenty letters in his hands, and sits down
in his room with his stenographer at his
side. The stenographer has a pencil and
a notebook. The Congressman takes up
letter by letter, and as fast as he can talk
reads off an answer to it, which the short
hand man takes down as fast as the words
fall from the members lips. A half hour
passes, and the twenty let ers have been
finished. What would have taken the
| member four hours to do for himself, he
has accomplished in thirty minutes by the
aid of his stenographer. This may be at
II o'clock in the morning. He now goes
to the Capitol and, when he returns for
| dinner at 5 bis twenty letters arc lying on
| the table ready for him to sign. He does
| this and his clerk mails them. Some
| Congressman allow their clerks to write
their notes or the type writer. Others
must have them written out by hand, as
letters on the typewriter look too much
F, like printed circulars. In written letters
| nine out of ten men who receive the let
ters will think the Congressman did all
the writing themselves. A long letter
from a Congressman is a big thing to the
constituent in the back county. He takes
it around and shows it to his friends,
then lays it away in the family Bible, and
keeps it as reverently as though it was his
grandfather's will and the old man was
yet alive, had lots of property, and likely
to drop off any day. Some Congressman
answer every letter they receive, no mat
ter how trivial the affair, or how silly the
request. Others throw a great part of
their correspondence into the waste-bask-
ct, and some never read effice-seeking
letters at all. A great part of the CORE
spondenoe of "a Congressman relates to
garden seeds and public documents. An
Ohio member told me the other day that
his constituents kept a better track of the
government publications than he did
himself. e.-<Ghid he: They watch the
papers closely, and when anything new is
published my first knowledge of it, in
many cases, comes from requests for it.
The pension letters form another large
portion of the Congressmen's mail, and
General Grosvenor says that he gets let
ters from every State in the Union on
pension matters. 4 number of letters
have been coming in lately from an old
crank who wants Congress to pension
school teachers who have outlived their
usefulness. This man says that the gov
prnment has millions of idle money in the
treasury and he thinks that fifteen mil
lions ought to be devoted to this purpose.
A Kansas man got a letter the other day,
accompanied by a curious horseshoe,
which a blacksmith wanted him to get
patented for him, and another member ]
know has just answered a letter of q
Yankee doctor who is anxious that the
President should send him out West al
the government v~accinator of the Indians