Repository: UIHistories Project: Book - History of the University (Powell) [PAGE 537]

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496

istory University of Illinoi

lowing items, in particular, and whatever else could be brought into it. Companies of capitalists and speculators were formed at the capital, and over the state, to play into each others hands, a part were to manage ostensibly the state capital interests of some three to five millions; a part the southern penitentiary and a part to lease the state prison for ten years, so that the prisoners might be compelled to hew the stone for these edifices, and also for a branch of the Insane asylum to be located in the vicinity of Peoria, at the expense of the state, while the sharpers pocketed the funds from the taxes paid by the people on the contracts. The canal and river scheme from Chicago across the state toward the west, investing some ten or twelve millions more before it is completed, was embraced in the plot. It was understood that if Champaign would throw her vote for all these schemes, whether other counties offered more or less for the location of the University, the institution was at all hazards to be located at Champaign. Thus this "Champaign ring" stood ready pledged to saddle the taxpayers of the state with some fifteen or twenty millions of dollars of prospective debts and obligations, provided the representatives of the people would at all hazards locate the University at Champaign, and relieve them of their embarrassments on their mortgaged buildings and lands. Although your committee were fully aware of this scheme before the session commenced, and made all the resistance to it in their power, it was in the end carried out; only enough members in the ring voting erratically or occasionally voting against the measure, only to renew it again, to disguise their acts, from the scrutiny of the people. At the opening of the session the "Champaign ring," as usual, were on hand with open rooms and wine and liquors free to friends, and another five thousand dollars of "pin money," besides the one hundred thousand in reserve, voted by their county, which, was at first wholly withheld from their offer to the state. The correspondents of the public press and in some instances the editors themselves, were notoriously and shamelessly bought up, and suborned to the uses of this ring and their columns closed against an effectual warning or remonstrance in behalf of the people. Before the legislature convened threats were openly made by the ring, against the state institutions both at Bloomington