Page:History of Iowa From the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the Twentieth Century Volume 3.djvu/264

 fellow men, and this power should be most jealously scrutinized. Incorporated wealth has many rights; but it should always be remembered that among these is not the right to vote. Corporations have, and ought to have many privileges; but among them is not the right to sit in political conventions or occupy seats in legislative chambers. The conscience and intelligence of the natural man must be the sole factors in determining what our laws shall be and who shall execute them. One phase of corporate interference ought speedily to disappear under the righteous indignation of honest men. The professional lobbyist has, I regret to say, become one of the features of legislative assemblies; he has become a stench in the nostrils of a decent community and ought to be driven out with the lash of scorn, pursued by the penalties of the law from the presence of every official and from the precincts of every legislative body in the republic. The lobbyist who is for or against anything for hire, who haunts the chamber of legislation and taints the atmosphere with his corrupt designs, who shadows members at their homes and hotels, injecting his poison into the public service, is a criminal, whose approach is an insult, and to whom the doors of the Capitol should never swing inward.”

Among the more important acts of this session may be mentioned, one requiring railroad companies to follow a uniform system in making reports to the Executive Council to aid in the assessment of their property; an act making it a crime for a tenant to sell property upon which the landowner has a lien for rent; an act making a special levy of taxes for the benefit of the State University, State College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts, and the State Normal School; an act to provide for an exhibit at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition; for the erection of monuments to mark the position occupied by Iowa regiments in the siege of Vicksburg, and at the battles of Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge. An act was also passed for the creation of a commission to superintend the completion of the State House; and one making important changes in the supervision of road work. The supervisor districts are consolidated into but one composed of an entire township, over which one superintendent has entire charge. The whole road tax is to be paid in money and the work to be done by contract.

The joint resolution passed by the Twenty-eighth