Senator North by Gertrude Atherton

"Now! " exclaimed Sally Carter, who was sobbing hysterically, "I hope they will impeach the President if he delays any longer with the _Maine_ report and if he doesn't send a warlike message on top of it. After that speech I don't see why Congress should wait for him at all."

It was the seventeenth of March, and she and Betty were driving home from the Capitol after listening to the Senator from Vermont on the situation in Cuba, -- to that cold, bare, sober statement of the result of personal investigation, which produced a far deeper and more historical impression than all the impassioned rhetoric which had rent the air since the agitation began. He appeared to have no feeling on the matter, no personal bias; he told what he had seen, and he had seen misery, starvation, and wholesale death. He blamed the Spaniards no more than the insurgents, but two hundred thousand people were the victims of both; and the bold yet careful etching he made of the Cuban drama burnt itself into the brains of the forty-six Senators present and of the eight hundred people in the galleries.