The urgent need of a new capitol was generally admitted. But the justness or propriety of a measure is not alone sufficient to secure legislation. The jealousy of rival towns was fanned into fierce opposition. Their representatives fought an appropriation with tooth and nail. Two million dollars was magnified into unheard-of proportions. Time-serving politicians who admitted privately that the State needed a capitol badly, tore passion to tatters in portraying the poverty and distress of the taxpayers. With a State "full of barefooted women and barefooted children" they asseverated such an expenditure would be criminal. Such "politics" long prevailed. In 1867, the people of Des Moines elected to the House of Representatives, Hon. John A. Kasson, to conduct the fight for the appropriation. No better man could have been chosen. He had attained distinction as Assistant Postmaster-General under President Lincoln, and as a member of Congress. With what tact, patience and diplomacy he carried on the contest his career since as our country's envoy to the courts of Austria and Germany indicates. For five years Mr. Kasson struggled with recalcitrant representatives through trying vicissitudes before he got the appropriation. As it was, he escaped defeat by but one vote to spare, and that vote he would have lost but for the timely aid of a Catholic priest, Father Brazil, of the city. The opposition resorted to the rascally ruse of getting a bibulous member who was friendly to the measure dead drunk and locking him up to prevent his attendance at the time of the vote. On being informed of the trick, Father Brazil sought out the recreant son of Erin, secured him, and marched him up to the House chamber just as the roll was about to be called, and sat severely by until his charge had answered "Aye." [Illustration THE CAPITOL, DES MOINES.] It took twelve years to build the capitol. During practically all of that time its construction was under the absolute control of three commissioners, John G. Foote, Peter A. Dey, and Robert S. Finkbine, and the stately structure that now adorns Capitol Hill is a monument to their intelligence and integrity. Not an unwise expenditure nor a dishonest or corrupt transaction was ever charged against their stewardship, and the people of Iowa hold their names and services in grateful memory. It is a sad commentary on our public morals that the erection of a State capitol without suspicion of corruption is so exceptional as to be noteworthy and the proud distinction of the people of this Western commonwealth. [Illustration THE IOWA HISTORICAL LIBRARY.]