The morning times., 1895-12-29
Ready for Transportation.

Tom Hood sang about or anything De
Quincy dreamed about. 1t has been very
truly said OF the bundles of promises, which
come In every days mail or Senator OF
member of Congress, that they have red
strings tied 10 them which probably may
be the origin of u very common phrase.
MR.. TlLLMAN's CALCULATIONS.
The Junior Senator from South Carolina,
B. r. Tulman had a bunch of this tape in
his hand the other day at his rooms on
Massachusetts, avenue, and the picturesque
tangled mass suggested TO him the idea
that the a accumulation Of this in years would
make a line long enough to realize what the
mathematicians call the line of infinity
This thou glit suggests q good many others.
The waste basket OF every Senator or
member of the House Is more or less filled
with this tape after the arrival OF ieW
mails Some OF them get mail three times
q day, rome of them five times, and some,
who live in the nearby States, get IL ten
OF twelve times a day.
In the Senate and House their bundles
of papers and letters are tied up with the
tape and as the size or the bundles varies
the length of the tape varies. 1t Is cold
day, however when the least measurement
of tape is not ten feet for each member,
and this is where arithmetic comes In to
1uggle with the facts.
400 members who may be said to be swad-
died, from their official infancy, In tape.
II each of them only got ten feet day
the red tape line would be 400 feet In
length, but considering the big piles of
country papers and parcels it is more Ike
fifteen feet, which will make 600 feet or
zoo yards per diem.
In one month they get l 900 linear feet
OF the stuff and in the long session of about
he raCQivo Al 600 feet.
As there are 5, $50 feet in mile this bundle
of tape IL unrolled would cover a distance
of twenty miles.
ONE NILE A YEAR.
Every member of the lower house, If he
serves only one term, gets each year o,415
| feet which is more than a mile per year, or
more than twomiles In his two years OF serv-
| ice. A Senator would get In his six years
six miles and twelve hundred feet.
As each gets about a mile a year, the
whole body gets four hundred miles of 1t
| per annum, and this would be enough to
string Pennsylvania avenuefr from the capital
| 10 the Treasury exactly four hundred times.
This tape is a quarter OF an Inch wide.
| As four hundred miles of 1t are spun In q
| year for the House and Senate that means
Q line an inch wide and 52S, ,200 feet long,
| or a line foot wide $4,000 feet long. If
this were reduced to square measure 1t
| WOulQ xlVc . UOIt VI uCdEly O,OoV SbLoe VI
| cloth, all wool and yard wide.
Iuone year the tape would therefore make
| trousers for two regiments of the standing
army, and as there are supposed to be
| about 25, 900 men in the army, the whole
outfit could have been dressed out in this
gorgeous outfit had Congress begun to
ecopomize on red tape about fifteen year,
ago.
To bring the matter, however, down tt
! If Congress- will 0DIl
| abolish the red tape business, and have
| the next years stuff manufa ctured into Q
bolt of cloth it will furnish red petticoats
which is favorite color, for all the
soldiers wives In the army.
Somebody has gone to the trouble t.
calculate what the whole government a
Washington uses in tape during the year
Ithas been found that the Senate and HOUSE
represent, or rather consume, only one
tenth of the whole amount, so that the Who'll,
line for one year would be four thousant
miles, That means that the yearly lin
would reach from New York to San Fran
cisco, and stretch out a thousand miles int
the Pacific ocean.
EQUIVALENT IN CLOTHING.
This is a tremendous consideration wher
arithmetic gets an inning with it. A lin
four thousand miles long and quarter o
an inch wide is a line twenty-seven mile
long and a yard wide or forty-seven thous
and five hundred and twenty square yards
This would clothe seventeen Thousand
soldiers with pantaloons or on the sam
average make red underwear for about hal
as many female camp followers.
| As it is twenty-seven miles long and {
ward wide il would make a sheet q mile lonl
and twenty-seven yards wide or Gn awning
for Pennsylvania avenue reaching from
the Capitol to the Treasury, eighty-one fee
wide.
Z The whole output for year would max
] n line which would extend from Gomez