State Legislation 105 



to use in his next rhetorical flight, without regard 

 to the exact meaning. There was a laboring man's 

 'advocate in the last Legislature, one of whose efforts 

 -ttracted a good deal of attention from his magnifi- 

 ,ent heedlessness of technical accuracy in the use of 

 similes. He was speaking against the convict con- 

 tract-labor system, and wound up an already suffi- 

 ciently remarkable oration with the still more start- 

 ling ending that the system "was a vital cobra which 

 was swamping the lives of the laboring men." Now, 

 he had evidently carefully put together the sentence 

 beforehand, and the process of mental synthesis by 

 which he built it up must have been curious. "Vi- 

 tal" was, of course, used merely as an adjective of 

 intensity; he was a little uncertain in his ideas as 

 to what a "cobra" was, but took it for granted that 

 it was some terrible manifestation of nature, pos- 

 sibly hostile to man, like a volcano, or a cyclone, or 

 Niagara, for instance ; then "swamping" was chosen 

 as describing an operation very likely to be per- 

 formed by Niagara, or a cyclone, or a cobra; and 

 behold, the sentence was complete. 



Sometimes a common phrase will be given a new 

 meaning. Thus, the mass of legislation is strictly 

 local in its character. Over a thousand bills come up 

 for consideration in the course of a session, but a 

 very few of which affect the interests of the State at 

 large. The latter and the more important private 

 bills are, or ought to be, carefully studied by each 

 member ; but it is a physical impossibility for any one 

 man to examine the countless local bills of small im- 



