So the Committee were obliged to examine by itself the evidence in regard to the right to vote of each of several hundred persons.
The case turned finally on some very interesting questions of the law of domicile.

It appeared that a considerable number of persons who were entitled to vote, if they were resident of the district where they voted, were workmen employed in the construction of a railroad.

They had come from outside the district for that purpose alone, and had no purpose of remaining in the district after the railroad should be completed, and meant then to get work wherever they could find it, there or elsewhere.

There were also a number of votes cast by students who had gone to college for the purpose of getting an education, having no design to remain there after their studies terminated.
Still another class of voters whose right was in dispute, were the paupers abiding in the public almshouse, and maintained in common by a considerable number of townships and parishes.
These paupers voted in the district where the almshouse was situated, although it was not the district of their domicile or residence when they were removed to it.
The Committee held in the case of the laborer,--in spite of the very earnest contention to the contrary, that if the laborer elected in good faith when he came into the district to make it his legal residence, it became his legal residence, even if he intended to leave it and get another after his job was done.
We applied a like doctrine to the case of the students, holding that a student of a college, being personally present in any district, had the right if he so desired, to take up his abode there, and make it by his election his legal residence for a fixed and limited time.
The question of the paupers we left undecided, as it turned out that whichever way it were decided, Mr.Cessna had not overcome his opponent's legal majority.
We also decided an Arkansas case where the title to his seat of a well known Republican member of Congress was at stake, in favor of his Democratic contestant.
I was somewhat gratified in the midst of a storm of vituperation which I had encountered for some political action of mine, in which I was charged by almost the entire Democratic press of the country with being a bitter partisan to find two Democratic gentlemen who had owed their seats to the impartiality of the Committee on Elections, coming very zealously to the rescue.
I served also from 1873 to 1875 on the Committee on Railroads and Canals.

I have no recollection of doing anything on that Committee, except aiding in reporting a bill for the regulation by National authority of railroads engaged in interstate commerce, in defence of which I made a very elaborate speech.