At their
mansions is dispensed a noble hospitality, rich in the feasts of body
and mind, generous and open as was Virginia's in her proudest days. At
Washington I would represent these, and the merchant-princes of her
metropolis. You have said, as eloquently as truly, 'There is but one
Mississippi River; but one Louisiana; but one New Orleans on the face
of the earth.' As she is, and as her people are, I would represent her
as her senator.
"I am a beggar, and cannot consent, in this character, to be made more
conspicuous, by being made a beggarly senator. I cannot take a house
in Washington, furnish it, and live in it as a gentleman. I could not,
in any other manner, entertain my people visiting Washington,
consistently with my ideas of what a senator should do. I cannot go to
Washington, and, as one of them, stand among the great men of the
Senate, in that magnificent hall, and feel my soul swell to theirs and
its proportions, and then dodge you, or any other gentleman from
Louisiana, and sneak home to a garret. My means would allow me no
better apartment. I could not live in the mean seclusion of a
miserable penury, nor otherwise than in a style comporting, in my
estimation, with the dignity and the duty of a senator from Louisiana,
as some have done, who were able to live and entertain as gentlemen,
for the purpose of the degraded saving of half my _per diem_ to swell
my coffers at home.
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