Time & Perspective Quote by William Whipple

The line lands like an 18th-century eye-roll, aimed not at ideology but at process: the slow, self-important machinery of deliberation. Whipple is apologizing only to sharpen the blade. "I am sorry to say" reads as etiquette, the kind of polite throat-clearing that lets a public man deliver a private irritation without sounding petty. Then he detonates the real complaint: trifles are eating "precious time" because some members can’t resist turning every minor question into a courtroom drama.

The subtext is that Congress is being colonized by a professional temperament. "Long and repeated speeches" suggests not principled debate but performance: the rhetorical equivalent of billing by the hour. "Chicanery" goes further, implying procedural tricks and bad-faith maneuvers - not just verbosity, but strategy masquerading as civic duty. The phrase "gentlemen who will not wholly throw off the lawyer even in Congress" is a neat cultural jab. It assumes lawyers are trained to win rather than to decide, to stretch uncertainty instead of closing it, to treat rules as weapons. Whipple isn’t condemning law; he’s condemning what happens when adversarial habits become the default mode of governance.

Context matters: revolutionary-era politics prized republican virtue, a suspicion of self-interest, and an urgency shaped by war and fragile institutions. Against that backdrop, wasting time is not an annoyance but a moral failure. Whipple is warning that the republic can be strangled not only by enemies, but by professionals luxuriating in procedure. The complaint still scans because it names a durable pathology: institutions can die of talking.