The 'Million Dollar' Legislature

Washington entered upon its independent sovereign existence of one of the sisterhood of states under peculiar, and I might say unfavorable, conditions. Inhabited as it was by two distinct classes of people—the carpet-bagger and the homesteader—the former shrewd and unscrupulous, the latter trusting and careless. As a result, the federal appointees under the territorial regime easily retained control of affairs after the birth of the state government. Although Washington has been a state but two years the legislature has been in session more than six months at a cost to the state, for the members only, of $210,000. This takes no account of the numerous clerks and assistants, nor the wild and extravagant appropriations of each of the legislatures. So extravagant have been their appropriations that each legislature has been appropriately dubbed the 'million dollar legislature.' The incompetency of the members of the first two legislatures of Washington has been almost a by-word. The tricks and antics, and in some instances the absolutely ungentlemanly conduct, of Washington's first state legislator brought the blush to fair-minded citizens.