Alexandria Gazette

Things in Washington.
Correspondence of the New York Express.
Washington, Feb. 27.—The Democrats are as thick here as grass-hoppers in Summer or bees in their hives They hop, fly, and swarm everywhere. The hotels are full of them,— the boarding houses are full of them, and the private dwellings are filling up with them. The parlors of the hotels have rows of beds on each side of the room. There are extra beds in the halls, in the dining rooms, reading rooms, and wherever there is a place big enough for a bedstead. And yet "the cry is still they come." Providentially, Washington is both capacious and hospitable; Georgetown is not far off, and Alexandria near at hand: Baltimore but two hours distant, and with a decent Rail Road would be but an hour’s ride from the capitol: and so there is no danger of being turned out of house and home. So far as office and applications for office are concerned, there is not a shortage, if all were to receive an equal division of the spoils. There must be one hundred disappointed for every one satisfied: and office-seekers, if they are wise, in counting their chances in advance will calculate as in a lottery where the ticket is a very costly one and where there are a hundred blanks to one prize. The great temptation to all this is the high salaries paid for public service and the small amount of work required compared with other branches of business. But the highest prizes ought not to induce any one to seek office. To most men it is the poorest sort of compensation, and to those who have genius, ambition and enterprise, office never yet yielded a reward that satisfied its possessor. Nothing so much deadens the lives of men, or so much destroys the hopes of youth, or so much unfits those unfortunately doomed to removal for the consequences of disappointment as Government Clerkships. The chances of promotion are few and far between, and personal merit is always secondary to the influences of favoritism at Court. And the worst feature of all this is that as the government grows, demands for office increase. In view of the picture presented here to-day, the anticipations for place, the multitude of applicants, the clique-isms, the back-bitings, private calumnies and more open assaults upon character, one cannot but feel that the President-elect, is the least to be envied of any man in the whole country. There is no unity in the Democratic party, and there can be none, no upon men or principles. With the over-powering majorities which there are in both Houses of Congress we behold the Pacific Railroad Bill, the Navy Reform Bill, and a score of other measures, all sacrificed, and it is barely possible that in the end the General Appropriation Bills may become Laws.

Among the visitors here are at least two hundred Democratic ex-members of Congress.— They are either for themselves personally or to serve friends who have sent them here.