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Show BRUTALLY PRACTICAL. Mr. Secretary Bonaparte ought to keep the accounts of his bureau all right. No flights of imagination im-agination ever come to divert his mind from his duties; no sentiment disturbs him; none of the gentler emotions ever intrude upon him; he fills Dickens' description of a perfect bookkeeper: "Born with a pen behind his ear; his heart an inkstand." ink-stand." He wants the old Constitution made a target for war crews to practice their guns on, because scarce a timber of the original Ironsides remains. He is willing that another Ironsides shall be built, built of the best material, armed with all the glory and power of modern cannon; given engines that will make the leviathan likewise a racer of the deep, but he has no use for the old craft. We hope that while secretary he will never visit Mount Vernon; for his practical mind would instantly reason that after the hundred and six years' sleep there, nothing of the original Washington Wash-ington remains in that silent sarcophagus, nothing noth-ing except, perhaps, a few buttons from his coat and a little mould; and he would be apt to say: "It is an idle and senseless sentimentality to cling to that old fashioned tomb; the real Washington Wash-ington is no more; why cling to the dust?" He does not comprehend that when the average American stands before that humble grave, in thought he sees the real Washington as he looked when trying to save Braddock's army; as he looked at Monmouth and Princeton and Trenton; at Valley Forge when the majesty of his presence caused the common soldier to forget that he was hungry and cold. Secretary Bonaparte might as well say: "Discard "Dis-card that sentimentality, obliterate that grave and raise a new Washington," as to say, "Make a target tar-get of the old Constitution, and build a new one that will be of practical value." When the average American boy looks upon the Constitution, he does not stop to ask if those are the identical decks on which the heroes of the old time fought and died; rather, he in thought sees those men as they were under the battle's canopy, sees them as they were when they set the pace for the American navy for all time, those self-contained smiIs that laughed death to scorn and wrung victory out of defeat. And the3' go away with higher thoughts, with a more earnest patriotism, and the more of them that visit the old-fashioned ship, the more that stand with bared brows before that rusty grating and look in upon the two humble marble caskets in which George and Martha were composed in their last sleep, the safer the country will be, for it is on such spectacles that patriotism is nurtured. |