“I know little about politics.  I am merely one of the hundreds of young men in this State who stand on the outside of politics and want the opportunity to be honest when we vote.  We appeal to the older men of this State to drop the game for a little while and give us a chance to start fair.  The biggest corporation in this State is the State itself, and I like to think that all of us, young or old, are partners or stockholders.  I’ve been brought up in business.  We know what we’d all do in straight business.  Why can’t we do it in State affairs?  Too many influences surround a legislature to make its work really deliberative.  After the heat and arguments of this session have died away we ought to have a meeting on a real business basis.

“Let the churches, the grange, the radicals, the liberals, the hotel men, the liquor men, all send their delegates.  Let that assemblage take thought on a plan which will lift out of politics a question that doesn’t belong there.  Let’s end civil war on this question.  Give the young men some other picture as their eyes open on the politics of this State.”

It was the earnest, ingenuous appeal of one crying out of the wilderness of human uncertainty—­of one who saw the evils in those attempts of men to curb greed and appetite—­of one earnestly seeking a remedy, but not clearly understanding that so long as the world shall endure, with men and women weak and human, some problems must remain unsettled.

“I’ll suggest a place for that convention,” muttered Thelismer Thornton to those who stood about him.  “Hold it in Purity Park in Paradise!  Settle the rum question!” he sneered.  “Noah hadn’t been stamping around on dry ground long enough to get his quilts aired out before he was drunk on Noah’s Three Star!  And Japheth probably got mad and passed a prohibitory law and thought he had the trouble fixed forever.”

When the legislature finally adjourned the protestations that had been wrung out of it promised much in the way of honest reorganization.

Harlan Thornton remained with Governor Waymouth for a time.  His Excellency found him indispensable.

The commissions were at work.

Office-holders whined, taxpayers squirmed.  Honesty was greeted everywhere by wry faces.

But the “Thornton law,” its deputies superseding county and city authority, was the bitterest political pill of all.  The results discouraged the righteous—­Governor Waymouth predicted them accurately with the old-age cynicism of one who understood human nature.  The flagrantly open places were closed.  But innumerable dives thereby secured the business which had gone to the open places in the days of toleration.  An army could not have closed the dives—­the proprietors of which, in most cases, carried their villanous concoctions on their persons.  Express companies were organized for the sole purpose of dealing in liquors by the parcel system, and the State’s liquor agencies, established under the protection of the prohibitory law itself, were besieged by patrons who stood in queues of humanity like buyers at a theatre ticket-window.