Autobiography of Charles Clinton Nourse: Prepared for use of Members of the FamilyNourse, Charles Clinton
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Autobiography of Charles Clinton Nourse: Prepared for use of Members of the Family
Nourse, Charles Clinton
Iowa -- Politics and government; Lawyers -- Iowa -- Biography; Nourse, Charles Clinton, 1829-
believe what they afterwards realized, that though the courts might
assess penalties, yet an executive who believed the penalty to be
unjust could easily be persuaded to exercise pardoning power in their
remission, and such was the result. For four years during the
administration of Horace Boies the effort to enforce the prohibitory
law was almost paralyzed. After incurring all the expense and trouble
incident to the conviction of any one violating the prohibitory law,
the people had the mortification of seeing the judgments of the courts
rendered nugatory by the wrongful exercise of the pardoning power,
vested by the constitution in the governor for wise and proper
purposes, prostituted by an unscrupulous politician for his own
political advancement and that of his party.
Another cause of this successful revolution in the politics of the
state arose from the absolute cowardice of the leading republicans of
the state in not defending the legislation for which they were
responsible. During the candidacy of Boies for his second term, a
gentleman who was a candidate on the state ticket for a state office
applied to me and asked my consent to publicly discuss the question of
prohibition with Mr. Boies in case the state central committee of the
party would arrange for such discussion. I gave my consent to such an
arrangement, provided the committee would agree to the same, but he
afterwards reported to me that the committee did not think it
advisable. On the part of the public speakers in behalf of the
republican cause the only discussion of the question of prohibition was
an apology for the enactment of the law. They did not attempt to
discuss the question of right or wrong, but only that the law was
enacted because the people by their vote upon the constitutional
amendment had signified their approval of prohibition. The result of
this cowardice and the four years' domination of the democratic party
had its result in the platform adopted by the republican state
convention in the year 1893. Only the year before this the republican
state convention had adopted a resolution promising the people of the
state that the party would take no backward step on the subject of
prohibiting the sale of intoxicating liquors as a beverage, and at this
convention in 1893 they adopted the following resolution:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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