Repository: UIHistories Project: Book - History of the University (Powell) [PAGE 538]

EXTRACTED TEXT FROM PAGE:

Report of a Committee on Location of the UiwveTsiiy 497 and Jacksonville to deter the people of Morgan and McLean from entering into any competition or effort against them, and the warfare was kept up against these institutions, more or less, brisk until the fate of the University was decided. Thus if this ring could not be allowed to steal with impunity from the resources of the state, the deaf and dumb and blind and insane and all the public teachers and pupils of the state at Bloomington, and Jacksonville were to be turned into the street. To such a pass were things carried that the honest people of Champaign county itself, felt at last compelled to remonstrate against the conduct of this ring of unprincipled knaves and sharpers. Remonstrances to the legislature were gotten up in seven of the different townships of Champaign county, signed in some instances by every tax payer in the township, praying the legislature not to legalize the taxes about to be imposed upon them by this ring, on the ground of the illegality of the pretended election. The pressure of their existing taxes, and above all from their conviction that the $5,000 of public funds which had been put into the hands of a committee of which Dr. Scroggs, M. L. Dunlap and Priest Stoughton and Mr. Rep. Griggs of Champaign were active members, had been used during the session for corrupt purposes; as the committee of 1865 had refused to account for their use of the money, or to refund any part of it as required to do by order of the court committing it into their hands and also because they believed that the five thousand dollars furnished for the session of 1867 had been " squandered corruptly 1 ^ for the same ends. They furnished extracts from their county records, taken under oath, to show that the charges were true, also extracts from the records of Champaign and Urbana townships, showing that five hundred dollars respectively had been voted by them, in addition to a like sum from private subscriptions for a similar purpose, making in all twelve thousand dollars which as it seems from their supervisors' report was expended to 1 incalculable advantage" upon somebody at Springfield* wer and above the $100,000 voted by th^county wldehi^j^.i^iiNd after much prompting offered on p a p | | to the state, but which has not f?t been paid over and probably never will be u n t ^ ^ w y ^ p l e of Champaign submit to a new bleefjng by way of l l r a S ^ ^ H