On an evening a little later, this same personage--a man greatly respected in his community, whose utterances on civic affairs are often quoted in the papers--attended a dinner at one of the big hotels. Many eminent jurists and publicists were gathered together to do honor to one of their number. A little bar, with a man in a neat white jacket in charge, had been set up in a room not too remote from the dining-room; and thither the Great Men repaired to refresh themselves after the arduous duty of imposing fines and prison sentences on ruffians who dispensed alcohol through the city to those who, like the Great Men, could pay for it. But--“Judge not, lest ye be jugged.” And the Young-Old Philosopher told me that once he stood in the private office of a well-known lawyer when the telephone bell rang. He could not help hearing the conversation, which ran somewhat like this: “Yes? That you, Pete?... A dozen cases of the same--_you_ know. Tonight, if possible. Try to get it there. Same price, of course.... Without fail; and I have a friend who wants to see you. Here’s the address: 000 Sherman. Call him up. He’s all right. Good-bye, Pete.” The Young-Old Philosopher has himself told me that he has no scruples about disobeying the liquor law; yet somehow it gave him no little pain to listen to this monologue, uttered by one whose life is given to forensic pleadings, whose maledictions pour forth in cataracts of eloquence when some shuddering nobody stands at the Bar of Justice. It is as though a priest left the altar to abscond, immediately after a high-minded sermon on the duties of Christians. In a far western State my friend saw the Governor take many highballs during and after a banquet in a public room. He saw the Mayor of the city do likewise; and he was conscious that a gentleman of the cloth was slowly but surely growing unconscious as the dinner went on its merry way. He had never before seen this happen. He was told by a fellow traveler, whose word he could not doubt, that all but 25 per cent of the Legislature of another western State went out and got beastly drunk, after they had voted for Prohibition. He has heard the jibes that foreigners, seeing what he has seen, fling at us every day; and he has had no answer to give them. He has come upon boys trying to open the lockers in country clubs--not little rowdies, but the sons of influential members--that they might steal some of the old man’s whiskey. They have boasted of their attempted and successful thefts. He has seen flappers disgustingly intoxicated. He has observed them putting their hands up to the hip-pockets of their boy companions, to see if a flask was there. Alas! it was. As limousines and taxis have flashed by him, he has caught glimpses of youngsters who, five years ago, would not have been allowed to go out without a chaperone, in such close proximity that for a moment he thought it was but one strange enigmatic form in the car.