It is sufficient to say that the supreme court held the provisions of the inter-state commerce law, that gave to shippers a remedy for unjust discrimination by a civil suit for damages, to be a penal statute upon the ground that if the railroad company discriminated by charging one person ten dollars for a particular service and charged another person twenty dollars for a like service, then a suit to recover back the ten dollars thus unjustly demanded and received by the railroad company was in the nature of a statute to recover a penalty. Upon this mode of reasoning a suit against any person or corporation who unjustly and unlawfully gets possession of my money, for the purpose of recovering back what they illegally obtained, would come under the head of a suit to recover a penalty. The trouble with the supreme court of the United States has been that they have uniformly regarded this legislation by congress to protect the people against unjust charges and discriminations as intended to punish the railroad companies of the country, and the court has felt called upon to protect the railroads from legislation interfering with their absolute control over their freight and passenger traffic. The court has assumed the role of a conservative element in the government, intended for the protection of railroad property against the legislative power of the country. CHAPTER XI DES MOINES RIVER LAND TITLES The next important litigation in which I was engaged during my professional career, of public interest, was my engagement by Roswell S. Burrows, one of the original stockholders of the Des Moines Navigation Company, in suits growing out of his ownership of certain lands belonging to the Des Moines river grants, so-called. I will not undertake in this paper to go into a detailed history of the Des Moines river titles, so-called. Colonel C. H. Gatch some years ago prepared for publication a series of articles that were published in the _Annals of Iowa_, Volume I, that gives a detailed account and history of the land grant by congress, and the various decisions of the United States land department construing the original grant of 1846, and also the decision of the supreme court of the United States in the numerous cases from time to time decided by that court. I deem this the most correct and just account of this important litigation that has ever been given to the public. Honorable B. F. Gue also published in his _History of Iowa_ what purports to be an account of the various decisions and rulings of the land department and of the actions of the courts with reference to these lands. A part of his history is correct, but in treating of the rights of certain of the settlers he has done great injustice to the stockholders of the Des Moines Navigation Company who furnished the money to the company for the purchase of these lands. The first unwarranted statement contained in Mr. Gue's history is that persons who brought and maintained suits