rink if his own
far greater and self-inflicted punishment is of no avail.

When a man has become a drunkard his punishment is complete. Think of law
makers enacting and making it lawful, in consideration of a certain amount
of money paid to the State, for dealers in liquors to sell that which
carries darkness, crime, and desolation with it wherever it goes! The
silver pieces received by Judas for betraying his master were honestly
gotten gain compared with the blood money which the license law drops
into the State's treasury--license money. What money can weigh in the
balance and not be found wanting where starved and innocent children,
broken-hearted mothers and sisters, and deserted, weeping wives are in the
scale against it? Mothers, look on this law licensing this traffic, and
then if you do not like it cease to bring forth children with human
passions and appetites, and let only angels be born.

After the passage of this law making drunkenness an offense to be fined, I
had all the law practice I could attend to in keeping myself out of its
meshes and penalties. It kept me busy to avoid imprisonment--for I was
drunk nearly all the time. I was indicted twenty-two times. But it is fair
to say that in a majority of cases these indictments were found by men in
sympathy with me, and whose chief object in having me arrested was to
punish the men who sold me liquor. Another mistake! It is next to
impossible to get a drunkard to tell where he got his liquor. Half the time
he himself does not know where he got it. I never indicted a saloon keeper
in my life. The sale of liquor has been legalized, and so long as that is
the case I would blame no man for refusing to tell where he got his liquor.
A law that permits an appetite for whisky to be formed, and then punishes
its victim after money, health, and reputation are all gone, is a barbarous
injustice. Instead of making a law that liquor shall not be sold to
drunkards, better enact a law that it shall be sold only to drunkards. Then
when the present generation of drunkards has passed away, there will be no
more. I succeeded in escaping from the penalty of the indictments found
against me. I plead, in most instances, my own case, and once or twice,
when so drunk that I could not stand up without a chair to support me, I
succeeded by resorting to some of the many tricks known to the legal
fraternity, in wringing from the jury a verdict of "not guilty."

But all this was anythi