Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2Hoar, George Frisbie
History
Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2
Hoar, George Frisbie
United States -- History -- 1865-1921; United States -- Politics and government -- 1865-1900
The case turned finally on some very interesting questions
of the law of domicile. It appeared that a considerable
number of persons who were entitled to vote, if they were
resident of the district where they voted, were workmen employed
in the construction of a railroad. They had come from outside
the district for that purpose alone, and had no purpose of
remaining in the district after the railroad should be completed,
and meant then to get work wherever they could find it, there
or elsewhere. There were also a number of votes cast by students
who had gone to college for the purpose of getting an education,
having no design to remain there after their studies terminated.
Still another class of voters whose right was in dispute,
were the paupers abiding in the public almshouse, and maintained
in common by a considerable number of townships and parishes.
These paupers voted in the district where the almshouse was
situated, although it was not the district of their domicile or
residence when they were removed to it.
The Committee held in the case of the laborer,--in spite of
the very earnest contention to the contrary, that if the laborer
elected in good faith when he came into the district to make
it his legal residence, it became his legal residence, even
if he intended to leave it and get another after his job was
done.
We applied a like doctrine to the case of the students, holding
that a student of a college, being personally present in any
district, had the right if he so desired, to take up his abode
there, and make it by his election his legal residence for
a fixed and limited time.
The question of the paupers we left undecided, as it turned
out that whichever way it were decided, Mr. Cessna had not
overcome his opponent's legal majority.
We also decided an Arkansas case where the title to his seat
of a well known Republican member of Congress was at stake,
in favor of his Democratic contestant.
I was somewhat gratified in the midst of a storm of vituperation
which I had encountered for some political action of mine,
in which I was charged by almost the entire Democratic press
of the country with being a bitter partisan to find two Democratic
gentlemen who had owed their seats to the impartiality of
the Committee on Elections, coming very zealously to the rescue.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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