When a man has become a drunkard his punishment is complete.  Think of law makers enacting and making it lawful, in consideration of a certain amount of money paid to the State, for dealers in liquors to sell that which carries darkness, crime, and desolation with it wherever it goes!  The silver pieces received by Judas for betraying his master were honestly gotten gain compared with the blood money which the license law drops into the State’s treasury—­license money.  What money can weigh in the balance and not be found wanting where starved and innocent children, broken-hearted mothers and sisters, and deserted, weeping wives are in the scale against it?  Mothers, look on this law licensing this traffic, and then if you do not like it cease to bring forth children with human passions and appetites, and let only angels be born.

After the passage of this law making drunkenness an offense to be fined, I had all the law practice I could attend to in keeping myself out of its meshes and penalties.  It kept me busy to avoid imprisonment—­for I was drunk nearly all the time.  I was indicted twenty-two times.  But it is fair to say that in a majority of cases these indictments were found by men in sympathy with me, and whose chief object in having me arrested was to punish the men who sold me liquor.  Another mistake!  It is next to impossible to get a drunkard to tell where he got his liquor.  Half the time he himself does not know where he got it.  I never indicted a saloon keeper in my life.  The sale of liquor has been legalized, and so long as that is the case I would blame no man for refusing to tell where he got his liquor.  A law that permits an appetite for whisky to be formed, and then punishes its victim after money, health, and reputation are all gone, is a barbarous injustice.  Instead of making a law that liquor shall not be sold to drunkards, better enact a law that it shall be sold only to drunkards.  Then when the present generation of drunkards has passed away, there will be no more.  I succeeded in escaping from the penalty of the indictments found against me.  I plead, in most instances, my own case, and once or twice, when so drunk that I could not stand up without a chair to support me, I succeeded by resorting to some of the many tricks known to the legal fraternity, in wringing from the jury a verdict of “not guilty.”

But all this was anything but amusing.  I have never made my sides sore laughing about it.  The memory of it does not wreath my face in smiles.  It is madness to think of it.  I lived in a state of perpetual dread.  When in Indianapolis the sight of the police filled me with fear.  And here a word concerning the Indianapolis police.  There are, doubtless, in the force some strictly honorable, true, and kind-hearted men—­and these deserve all praise.  But, if accounts speak true, there are others who are more deserving the lash of correction than many whom they so brutally arrest.  Need they be told that they have no right to kick, or jerk,