[The Gilded Age Part 3. by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner]@TWC D-Link bookThe Gilded Age Part 3. CHAPTER XXIV 11/15
If you are a member of Congress, (no offence,) and one of your constituents who doesn't know anything, and does not want to go into the bother of learning something, and has no money, and no employment, and can't earn a living, comes besieging you for help, do you say, "Come, my friend, if your services were valuable you could get employment elsewhere--don't want you here ?" Oh, no: You take him to a Department and say, "Here, give this person something to pass away the time at--and a salary"-- and the thing is done.
You throw him on his country.
He is his country's child, let his country support him.
There is something good and motherly about Washington, the grand old benevolent National Asylum for the Helpless. The wages received by this great hive of employees are placed at the liberal figure meet and just for skilled and competent labor.
Such of them as are immediately employed about the two Houses of Congress, are not only liberally paid also, but are remembered in the customary Extra Compensation bill which slides neatly through, annually, with the general grab that signalizes the last night of a session, and thus twenty per cent.
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