The life and the letters continued on terms which I should not have
known how to wish different. I had a desk appointed me on the floor of
the Senate as good as any Senator's, for my convenience as a reporter;
and my father gave me notes of the proceedings in the House, so that I
could make a fair report of each day's facts which we so early abandoned
the pretense of his making. Every privilege and courtesy was shown the
press, which sometimes I am afraid its correspondents accepted
ungraciously. Either the first winter or the next one of them was
expelled from the floor of the House for his over-bold criticisms of
some member, and I espoused his cause with quite outrageous zeal. I had,
indeed, such a swollen ideal of the rights and duties of the press that
I spared no severity in my censure of Senators I found misguided. I was,
perhaps, not wholly fitted by my nineteen years to judge them, though
this possibility did not occur to me at the time with its present force;
but if I was not impressed with the dignity of the Senate, the dignity
of the Senate Chamber was a lasting effect with me, as, in fact, that of
the whole Capitol was. I seemed to share personally in it as I mounted
the stately marble stairway from the noble rotunda or passed through the
ample corridors from the Senate to the House where it needed not even a
nod to the sergeant-at-arms to gain me access to the floor; a nonchalant
glance was enough. But the grandeur of the interior, which I enjoyed
with the whole legislative body, was not more wonderful than its
climate, which I found tempered against the winter to a summer warmth by
the air rushing from the furnaces in the basement through gratings in
the walls and floors. These were for me the earliest word of the comfort
that now pervades our whole well-warmed American world, but I had
scarcely imagined them even from my father's report. How could I imagine
them or fail to attribute to myself something like merit from them? I
enjoyed, in fact, something like moral or civic ownership of the whole
place, which I penetrated in every part on my journalistic business: the
court-rooms, the agricultural department, the executive offices, and how
do I know but the very room of the Governor himself? The library was of
course my personal resort; as I have told, I was always getting books
from it, and these books had a quality in coming from the State Library
which intensified my sense of being of, as well as in, the capital of
Ohio.
Whether the city itself shared my sense of its importance in the same
measure I am not sure. There were reasons, however, why it might have
done so. It was then what would be now a small city, say not above
twenty thousand, and though it had already begun to busy itself with
manufacturing and had two or three railroads centering in it, the
industries and facilities which have now swollen its population to
almost a quarter of a million were then in their beginning. Its
political consciousness may have been the greater, therefore; it may
indeed have been subjectively the sovereign city which I so objectively
felt it. In that time, in fact, a state capital was both comparatively
and positively of greater reality than it has been since. With the Civil
War carried to its close in the reconstituted Union, the theory of State
Rights forever vanished, and with this the dignity which once clothed
the separate existence of the states. Their shadowy sovereignty had
begun to wane in the anti-slavery North because it was the superstition
of the pro-slavery South, yet I can remember a moment when there was
much talk, though it never came to more than talk, of turning this
superstition to a faith and applying it to the defeat of the Fugitive
Slave Law. If it was once surmised that the decisions of the Ohio courts
might nullify a law of the United States I do not believe that this
surmise ever increased the political consciousness of our state capital.
It remained a steadily prospering town like other towns, till now
perhaps it may not feel itself a capital at all. Perhaps it could be
restored to something like the quality I valued in it by becoming the
residence of envoys from the other state capitals, and sending a
minister to each of these. I have the conviction that public-spirited
citizens could be found to take such offices at very moderate salaries,
and that their wives would be willing to aid in restoring the shadow of
state sovereignty by leaving cards upon one another.