There was living in the neighborhood of the writer a Christian family—­though not of the Disciples—­who had a boy that they regarded as of great promise, and they did what they could to give him a good education.  After he had been for a while a school teacher, he became a lawyer, resident in Atchison, and finally became a politician.  He was talented, social, companionable and ambitious, and soon made himself a man of mark, and was petted and courted by the people, and was the idol of his father and mother.  All this brought him much into company.  But at that time the brewers and saloonkeepers exercised a despotism over the politicians and public men of the city as absolute as is the despotism of the Czar over the Russians.  But there was this difference:  instead of being slaves to a great monarch, these politicians were tools and lick-spittles to a set of coarse, brutal, low-bred liquor dealers, who were exceptionally ignorant, degraded and vile.  These wretched and vicious corrupters of the public morals insisted on controlling every caucus, and that the candidates, of whatever party, should be men well pleasing in their sight.  If not, then the fat was in the fire, and the candidate was forthwith slaughtered.  The writer of these Recollections has been a Republican as long as there has been a Republican party, and has probably loved the party as well as it has deserved.  This party, as is well known, has assumed to be “the party of moral and religious ideas.”  Now I have known, in cases not a few, men to be nominated for office by this party—­men who were respectable and Christian men, and they have told me, and they have made the confession with shame and humiliation—­that the party managers have come to them and said, “You are assessed so much for campaign expenses.”  The pretext was, that this was for legitimate campaign work; and yet they knew that the pretext was a lie, and that it was to constitute a corruption fund, to be put into the saloons.  And these men were thus made candidates, to give respectability to the saloonkeepers’ party, and, though they did not go into the saloons themselves, they must pay toll to the devil all the same.

It was under such circumstances that this boy, who had been raised in our neighborhood, but had grown to be a man, and had entered upon public life, now became a center of attraction to the hale-fellows-well-met of the saloon and the caucus.  The reader need not be told that this gifted young lawyer was walking into the very jaws of death.  There were soon alarming rumors that he was becoming dangerously addicted to drink, and his friends entreated him to save himself while he could, and he made promise to his mother and wife to reform.  But, alas! it was too late!

I was traveling home from Topeka, and on the railroad train I met a gentleman from Atchison—­an intimate friend of this young lawyer—­and I was congratulating him on the reformation of our mutual friend.  He shook his head, and said:  “don’t deceive yourself.  He tells me that he can remain sober two or three months, but that then he can held out no longer, and, not wishing to make a public spectacle of himself, he buys a bottle of liquor, locks himself up in his room, and goes into a regular debauch.  Then, after three or four days, he is able to appear on the streets again.”