The adjourned session of 1873 was for the special purpose of considering and enacting the new code, which the three commissioners had now spent nearly three years upon. Our time was limited by joint resolution to thirty days; and yet, during a considerable portion of our limited time, the railroad question occupied our attention. While we were in session, an extraordinary convention, or gathering of farmers, known as the "State Grange of the Patrons of Husbandry," met in Des Moines. This body was composed of the officers called Masters and Past Masters of the subordinate granges, or lodges, of a new secret society of agriculturists scattered throughout the state. This State Grange, or convention of delegates, numbered over twelve hundred members, representing, it was said, some seventy thousand farmers of Iowa. The meeting of this "Grange" lasted a week, and passed strong resolutions urging the legislature to enact a passenger and freight tariff law, and also presented an official petition to that effect.
The members of the senate in favor of such a law prepared twelve sections (mainly from the old O'Donnel bill) to be inserted in chapter 5 of title 10, of the proposed code, and I was chosen to offer them in the senate, at the proper time. This I did, and the first section was adopted almost before the railroad men could rally their forces. This section limits the fare for passengers to three and one-half (3½) cents per mile. But the other sections, which fixed a maximum rate for the transportation of all kinds of grain, produce, lumber, manufactures, and commodities, were lost by a tie vote, the president of the senate, Lieutenant Governor Bulis, refusing to vote, which was equivalent to voting against the sections. These sections were afterwards fixed to the chapter by the House, with an additional section, known as the "Keables Amendment," but were again lost in the senate for want of two votes.
The commissioners had omitted from the proposed new code all the so-called "Doud Amendments," and reservations of control by the state over railway corporations, on the ground that they were local or special provisions not to be included in a code of general laws. But some of us thought that those reservations of control, and special contracts, were of too important a character to the people of Iowa to be entirely ignored, and so I prepared an amendment to chapter 5, of title 10, in the following words:--