"I made the connection we are speaking of," continued the Judge, "when
I was a young man, just beginning practice. The liquor problem was
young then too. Communities did not take it too
seriously--particularly in the south where drinking was a matter of
course with gentlemen. The white-ribbon movement was in its infancy
and John B. Gough had hardly been heard of. To me--to the men I
knew--the 'temperance' agitation seemed a mere recurring fad, fostered
by pious and well-meaning persons, which cropped up--a kind of moral
seven-year locust--at periodic intervals. People lived more or less as
their grandfathers had lived before them on their plantations. And
their fathers had been fox-hunting, hard-living 'three-bottle men'
right down to the war. I had all the habits and prejudices of my
class. Liquor seemed to me like many another thing that was made to
minister to individual weakness, but was not in itself obnoxious. And
the decanter was never empty on my side-board. Yet even then the new
element in politics and in every-day life--the sentiment against
liquor--was growing. Times were slowly changing, men's outlook was
changing, and I knew--long before I admitted it to myself--that I was a
part of an industry which the best thought of the community no longer
approved, and that men who championed it were swimming against a
deepening and strengthening social current. I was stubborn, but at
last there came a day when I--changed too."
His voice had softened, had suddenly become surcharged with feeling.
He leaned over the table and caught up a small oval photograph, set in
a black-leathern frame. It was a picture of his son Chisholm, as a boy
of perhaps fourteen. He held it out in a hand that slightly trembled:
"That is why I changed, Craig. One night Chilly came home--drunk. I
had never seen him intoxicated, had never guessed that he could so far
forget himself. He was a mere boy, at school! In that moment the
sharp truth came to me. Shame stared at me from my own door-step. I
saw the text of the sermon that had been preached into my deaf ears--in
my own son!"
He broke off abruptly and set the picture back on the table. When he
spoke again his voice was more even:
"That hour, as I sat here in this same room, I--saw. Could anything
else have opened my eyes? Perhaps not. But that did. I saw all at
once what I had been bolstering. It was no longer a theoretical
question of the harm of the club-bar and the corner saloon to the
community. They were making a drunkard of _Chilly_! The Trust
furnished their stock-in-trade. And I had been the Trust's paid
tool--a part of its brain in this state--had guarded it from error,
shown how far it could go with impunity under the law, had even made
possible its organisation as it exists to-day! I, Chilly's father!
That night I wrote out my resignation as counsel. I mailed it before I
slept."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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