mechanical purposes.”  This was a stumbling-block laid in the way of feeble-minded Christians, for was not this an attack on their Christian liberty to use intoxicating wine at the Lord’s table, and would not this be awful?  Moreover, it forbade a farmer to manufacture hard cider from his own orchard, and would not this be a hard and tyrannical law?  This was vexatious, for we were fighting the saloon, and were not seeking to palter with such frivolous and intermeddling legislation.  Nevertheless, in spite of these crafty attempts to excite popular odium against the amendment, it was adopted by a majority of more than eight thousand, and it became the duty of the next Legislature to enact a law enforcing the amendment.  Then some of us waited on these “conscript fathers” at Topeka, and entreated them, and supplicated them, and almost got down on our knees to them, beseeching-them to use a little courage and common sense.  The House of Representatives was largely made up of farmers and men from the country, and was overwhelmingly in favor of an honest temperance law; but the Senate was largely made up of lawyers and men from the city, and was full of treachery and open and secret enmity.  And so the Senate took the lead in making the law, and got up a bill that they purposely made as full of imperfections as a sieve is full of holes, and sent it down to the lower house.  It was manifestly the duty of the House of Representatives to amend the bill, but now a great scare was got up.  The cry was raised:  “There is treachery! treachery!  You must adopt this Senate bill without amending it, to the extent of changing the dot of an i or the crossing of a t; for if it goes back to the Senate it will certainly be killed.” And yet the Senate had adopted it by an almost four-fifths majority!

The fact was, that these Senators, with all their bluster and bravado, were trembling in their boots, and dared not face their constituents at home while voting against any temperance law, however stringent, and this gave the friends of the law good warrant to make just such a law as was needed.  And so the bill became a law; and then there followed such a farce in the courts as might make us lose faith in our Christian civilization and in our civilized jurisprudence.  And it came to be understood that a coach-and-four could be driven through the loopholes that had been left in the law, and saloonkeepers began to remark, “Prohibition don’t prohibit.”  But from this evil we had what must be regarded a providential deliverance.  A judge was found who made up in his own integrity and courage whatever was imperfect in the provisions of the law, and his good example was followed throughout the State.