The legislature was reduced to the necessity of meeting in hired apartments for nearly twenty years before the state was able to erect a suitable structure.
The $40,000 appropriated to complete the penitentiary was expended on a building which should not have cost one third of the two appropriations, the state a dozen years later erecting another and better one at Salem.
To return to the legislative proceedings of 1854–5. Another partisan act of this body was the passage of a bill in which voting viva voce was substituted for voting by ballot—a blow aimed at anticipated success of the new party; and this while the Statesman made war on the anti-foreign and anti-catholic principles of the know-nothings, forgetting how zealously opposed to foreigners and catholics the first great democratic leader of Oregon, S. R. Thurston, had been. Specious reasons were presented in debate, for the adoption of the new rule, while the Statesman openly threatened to deprive of public patronage all who by the viva voce system were discovered to be opposed to democratic principles. In view of the coming election, the viva voce bill possessed much significance. It compelled every man to announce by voice, or by a ticket handed to the judge, his choice, which in either case was cried aloud. This surveillance was a severe ordeal for some who were not ready openly to part company with the democracy, and doubtless had the effect to deter many. As a coercive measure, it was cunningly conceived. Every whig in the house voted against it, and one third of the democrats, and in the council the majority was but two. This bill also possessed peculiar significance in view of the passage of another requiring the people to vote at the next election on the question of a
being, as the Statesman said, 'tired of the subject.' Avery, who was elected to the legislature in 1856, again endeavored to bring the subject before them, but the bill was defeated.
