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by armchairs. The President sits at the southern end of the table, with the Secretary

Cabinet
Room.

of State on his right, the Secretary of the Treasury on his left, and the others farther down the table. The more or less valuable portraits of several past Presidents look down upon them from the walls.

The Executive Mansion is well guarded. A large force of watchmen, including police officers, is on duty inside the mansion at all hours, and a continuous patrol is maintained by the local police of the grounds immediately surrounding the mansion. As an additional safeguard, automatic alarm signals are fixed in different parts of the house, and there are telephones and telegraphs to the military posts, so that a strong force of police and soldiers could be obtained almost at a moment's notice. The inadequacy of the White House as a residence for the President of the United States has long been recognized. It is crowded, inconvenient, and wholly unadapted to such dignity and occasions of public ceremony as the nation demands A New of its chief. There is not even accommodation for visitors, so that guests White House. of the nation must be sent to a hotel. Many suggestions and more or less elaborate plans have been made for a new and proper President's residence, which should be entirely separate from the Executive offices, for which the present White House might properly be reserved. Most of these proposals contemplate a magnificent edifice on Meridian Hill, 200 feet in elevation, at the head of Sixteenth Street. One such proposition, designed by Mary Henderson Foote and Paul J. Pelz, is illustrated herewith. It proposes a building in an ornate American adaptation of the Roman classic style of architecture, and constructed of white marble, with grand approaches. The west wing would be devoted to the home of the President's family, and the east wing to suitable accommodation for the nation's guests; while the central part, and the ground floor of the east wing, extended by elaborate conservatories, would be devoted to a series of state apartments, in which grand ceremonies and entertainments might be adequately arranged and carried out.

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VII.

THE EXECUTIVE DEPARTMENTS.

The Executive Departments are those over which the Cabinet officers preside, and in which the daily administration of the Government is carried on. There have not always been so many, nor have they always been known by their present names; and it is only recently, under the law of 1886, prescribing the order of succession to the Presidency, that any authoritative sequence could be observed in the list, which is now as follows:

The Department of State, presided over by the Honorable the Secretary of State.
The Treasury Department, the Secretary of the Treasury.
The War Department, the Secretary of War.

The Department of Justice, the Attorney-General.

The Post Office Department, the Postmaster-General.

The Navy Department, the Secretary of the Navy.

List of Departments.

The Department of the Interior, the Secretary of the Interior. The Department of Agriculture, the Secretary of Agriculture. All these are situated in the immediate neighborhood of the Executive Mansion, except those of the Post Office, Interior, and Agriculture.

The Departments are the business offices of the Government, and "politics" has much less to do with their practical conduct than the popular clamor would lead one to suppose. The occasional shirk or blatherskite makes himself noticed, but the average employe, from head to foot of the list, faithfully attends to his business and does his work. This must be so, or the business of the nation could not be carried on; and otherwise, men and women would not grow gray in its service, as they are doing, because their fidelity and skill can not be spared so long as their strength holds out. Year by year, with the growth of intelligence and the extension of the civil service idea and practice, "politics" has less and less to do with the practical administration of the business of the nation at its capital; and year by year, better and more economical methods and results are achieved. No civil pensions have yet been established as the further reward of long and faithful service.

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Department of State.

The Department of State stands first on the list, and occupies the south and noblest front of the State, War, and Navy Building that towering pile of granite west of the White House, which has been so honestly admired by the populace and so often condemned by critics. The architect was A. B. Mullet, who had a great fondness for the "Italian renaissance," as is shown by the post offices of New York and Boston, and by other public edifices executed while he was supervising architect of the Treasury. This building is 471 feet long by 253 feet wide, and surrounds a paved courtyard containing engine-houses, etc. It is built, outwardly, of granite from Virginia and Maine, and the four façades are substantially alike, though the south front, where space and slope of the ground favors, has a grander entrance than the other sides. The building was begun in 1871 and not wholly finished until 1893, covers four and a half acres, contains two miles of corridors, and cost $10, 700,000. It is in charge of a superintendent, responsible to a commission composed of the three Secretaries occupying it.

Foreign
Office.

All of the apartments of the "foreign office" are elegant, and one fancies he sees a greater formality and dignity, as certainly there is more of studious quiet, here than in any other department. The Secretary and assistant secretaries occupy a line of handsome offices in the second story, looking southward across the park, among which is the long and stately room assigned to conferences with representatives of foreign governments, or similar meetings, and hence called the Diplomatic Room. An opportunity to inspect this should be accepted, if only to obtain a sight of the likenesses of the past Secretaries of State, with which its walls are almost covered. All of these portraits are by men of talent, and some are of superior merit: That of Clay, by E. D. Marchant, and those of Fish and Frelinghuysen, by Huntington, are especially praised. Lord Ashburton is here also, beside Webster-his great coadjutor in the adjudication of the boundary between the United States and Canada. This room, the furniture, rugs, and hangings of which are dark and elegant, is said to have been arranged by Secretary Hamilton Fish. Near by is another elegant apartment - the Diplomatic Ante-room, where foreign dignitaries await audience with the premier.

The show room of the department, however, is the library, in spite of the fact that several curious objects formerly exhibited there are no longer on view.

"State"

Library

and Relics.

The precious original drafts of the Declaration of Independence and of the Constitution were disintegrating and fading under exposure to the light, and have been shut up in a steel safe, after having been hermetically sealed between plates of glass, which arrangement, it is hoped, will stop their decay. A precise facsimile of the Declaration, made about 1820, hangs upon the library wall. The Great Seal and certain curious early treaties of oriental and barbarous states are no longer exhibited. Here may be seen, however, the war sword of Washington - the identical weapon he was accustomed to wear in camp and campaign; and the sword of Jackson, at New Orleans - broken, to be sure, but mended by a skillful armorer, and not by himself at a blacksmith's forge, as the old story relates. Jefferson's writing-desk (at which, tradition says, the Declaration of Independence was drafted), Franklin's staff and buttons from his court dress, a lorgnette given by Washington to Lafayette, a copy of the Pekin Gazette, which has been printed continuously, as a daily newspaper, since the eighth century, and several other personal relics and historical curiosities will reward the visitor.

The library itself is a very notable one, equal to those of the governments of Great Britain and France in importance as a collection of books of international law and diplomacy. Cognate works, such as biographies, histories, and travels of a certain sort, supplement this central collection, and the whole now includes some 60,000 volumes. Its purpose is to serve as a reference library for the department. It also includes a great quantity of the papers of public men of the past, which have been acquired by purchase or otherwise, and are distinct from the correspondence archives of the department. For the papers of Washington (bound into 336 volumes) $45,000 was paid in 1834 and 1849; for the Madison papers (75 vols., 1848) $25,000; for the Jefferson MSS. (137 vols., 1848) $20,000; and for the Monroe papers (22 vols., 1849) $20,000. More recently have been acquired the papers of Hamilton (65 vols.), of Benjamin Franklin (32 vols., $35,000), and extensive records of the Revolutionary army.

The War Department has quarters in the same great building, occupying the western and part of the northern front, as is indicated by the cannons lying upon the buttresses of the porches. The Secretary and Assistant Secretary of War, War Office. the General of the army, and several military bureaus have their offices there, but none of them are open, of course, to the casual visitor. At the head of the staircase, near the northwestern corner, are models of certain arms and

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ordnance, and of wagons, ambulances, etc., and also two showcases of life-size lay fig ures exhibiting the uniforms of various ranks in the Revolutionary army. The wall of the staircase is embellished with portraits of past Secretaries, and in the corridor and ante-rooms of the Secretary's office are other paintings, including grand portraits of Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan, by Daniel C. Huntington. The Washington portrait here is one of Stuart's copies from his original study.

The old Winder building, on the opposite side of Seventeenth Street, erected many -years ago by Gen. Wm. H. Winder, an army officer who distinguished himself in the early part of the War of 1812, and commanded the troops here in 1814, was intended for a hotel. It was taken for offices of the War Department, however, and has been so occupied ever since. In it General Halleck had his office and the staff headquarters of the army during the Civil War, Secretary Stanton's office being in the building demolished to make room for the present structure.

Grant's Headquarters.

General Grant's Headquarters, when, after the war, he lived in Washington in command of the army, were in the large house with the high stoop on the opposite or southeast corner of Seventeenth and F streets. It is now a private residence. McClellan's headquarters during the early half of the war were at the northeast corner of Lafayette Square, now the Cosmos clubhouse.

The Navy Department has possession of the remaining third of the building, with an entrance facing the White House, signified by anchors upon the portico. The Secretary and Assistant Secretary preside over ten bureaus, whose chiefs are detailed officers of the navy. These are:

Bureaus of the Navy.

1. Bureau of Navigation, having the practical control of the ships and men in actual service, and including the Hydrographic Office and Naval Academy at Annapolis, but not the War College at Newport. 2. Bureau of Yards and Docks. 3. Bureau of Equipment, which has charge, among other things, of the Naval Observatory, the Nautical Almanac, and the Compass Office. 4. Bureau of Ordnance. 5. Bureau of Construction and Repair. 6. Bureau of Steam Engineering. 7. Bureau of Medicine and Surgery, under whose supervision is maintained a Museum of Hygiene, in the Old Naval Observatory, which is interesting to specialists. 8. Bureau of Supplies and Accounts (but the Navy Pay Office is at No. 1729 New York Avenue). 9. Office of the Judge Advocate Generalthe department's law officer. 10. Office of the Commandant of the Marine Corps, who is responsible directly to the Secretary of the Navy. By the time a ship is built, equipped, armed, and manned, she has gone through every one of these bureaus, and must have had a good pilot if she escaped being dashed to pieces against some of their regulations, or crushed by collision of authority between their chiefs.

The models of ships, on view in the corridor near the entrance and on the next floor above, form an exhibit of great interest, graphically displaying the difference between

Models.

the early wooden frigates and line-of-battle ships and the modern steel cruisers and turreted men-of-war. These models ought not to be overlooked; the library, also, is well worth attention, on account of the por traits of departed Secretaries, as well as for the sake of its professional books. The financial department and the actual treasury of the Government are housed in the imposing but somewhat gloomy building which closes the vista up Pennsylvania Avenue

Treasury
Building.

from the Capitol, and which nearly adjoins the White House park on the east. This structure, which, suitably to the alleged American worship of money, has been given the form of a pagan temple, is of the IonicGreek order of architecture modified to suit local requirements. The main building, with its long pillared front on Fifteenth Street, was erected of Virginia

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