Personal Recollections of Pardee ButlerButler, Pardee
Religion
Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler
Butler, Pardee
Kansas -- History -- 1854-1861
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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