Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 06.pdf/144

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Foreign Receivers and Judicial Assignees. He thus discovers that he has no power to sue in Iowa except by comity; that this comity is never extended to the prejudice of citizens of Iowa; and that it is deemed prejudicial to a citizen of Iowa to pay an honest debt contracted with a citizen of In diana. But, as he is a mere layman, and destitute of that reverence for the decisions of courts of last resort which is supposed to pervade the breast of every lawyer, and which is a part of the courtier-like habit of the legal profession, — he exercises his last remedy, that of going to the nearest saloon and there " cussing " the court. His solil oquy may be readily imagined. In the late war between the states, he was a soldier in a regiment sent out by the state of In diana; his regiment was placed in the same brigade with a regiment sent out by the state of Iowa; the two regiments stood .elbow to elbow in the "Hornet's Nest" at Shiloh, and, mingled together in one com mon mass, they held the hill at Chickamauga, "when fire and earthquake led the

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charge." Neither of them knew that they were the troops of two foreign powers. The Indiana boy did not know that the Iowa boys at his elbow were foreign auxiliaries; but both of them supposed that they were offering up their lives to prevent the citizens of eleven states of the American Union from becoming foreigners to them. It remained for the Indiana soldier, a quarter of a cen tury later, when he became the trustee of a firm under the insolvent laws of Indiana, to learn, through the teachings of the highest judicial tribunal in Iowa, that he was a for eigner in the state of Iowa, or a representa tive and official of a foreign government, and that he had no rights whatever in the state of Iowa. No doubt, when the lesson was delivered to him, his blood tingled, and he felt that the civil war had ended too soon, and the wish involuntarily arose in his heart that it had resulted in sponging out state lines and in abolishing the tribal theory of our government entirely.