Bishop’s Criminal Law 828; I Hilliard on Torts, 605

“At common law it was always the right of a citizen, without official authority, to abate a public nuisance, and without waiting to have it adjudged such by legal tribunal. His right to do so depended upon the fact of its being a nuisance. If be assumed to act upon his own adjudication that it was, and such adjudication was afterwards shown to be wrong, he was liable as a wrong-doer for his error, and appropriate damages could be recovered against him. This common law right still exists in full force. Any citizen, acting either as an individual or as a public official under the orders of local or municipal authorities, whether such orders be or be not in pursuance of special legislation or charter provisions, may abate what the common law deemed a public nuisance. In abating it, property may be destroyed, and the owner deprived of it without trial, without notice and without compensation. Such destruction for public safety or health is not a taking of private property for public uses without compensation, or due process of law, in the sense of the constitution. It is simply the prevention of its noxious and unlawful use, and depends upon the principle that every man must so use his property as not to injure his neighbors, and that the safety of the public is the paramount law. These principles are legal maxims or axioms essential to the existence of regulated society. Written constitutions presuppose them, are subordinate to them, and cannot set them aside.”

These great principles of civil jurisprudence and popular government apply alike in every state in the Union. An eminent jurist, Judge James Baker, of Evanston, Ill., formerly a resident of Missouri, gives his professional opinion of the late crusading by the women there. He maintains that it was legal; he points out that the saloons raided, at Denver and Lathrop, were unlawful and that they were “nuisances at common law.” He quotes Illinois law as follows: “As the summary abatement of nuisances is a remedy which has ever existed in the law, its exercise cannot be regarded as in conflict with constitutional provisions for the protection of the rights of private property and giving trial by jury. Formal legal proceedings and trial by jury are not appropriate and have never been used in such cases.” Judge Baker sums up the case thus: “The women who destroyed such property are not criminals. They have the same right to abate such common nuisances as men have to defend their persons or domiciles when unlawfully assailed. As the women of that state are denied the right to vote or hold office, I think they are fully justified, morally and legally, in protecting their homes, their families, and themselves from the ravages of these demons of vice in the summary manner which the law permits.”

More citations might be given proving the legality of joint smashing by the crusaders, but the foregoing is ample, for all fairminded, loyal people. Had the joint smasher’s cases been tried on their merits, not one would have been convicted of a misdemeaner. They were arrested, tried, convicted, imprisoned and fined for disturbing the “peace” of a common nuisance, and “malicious” destruction of rebel paraphernalia. Their only intent was against the treasonable liquor traffic. Had there been no liquor dispensing there had been no smashing. This the liquorized courts would not admit for a moment. Every ruling was a burlesque on civil law, a travesty on justice and a contemptible farce. The whole proceedings from beginning to end were a miserable outrage.

Decay and Decline of the American Republic

Today the country is ringing with the cry of political bribery, boodle and official corruption, from the highest to the lowest. The rum traffic is the principal factor in demoralizing and destroying the dignity, honor and integrity of civic life. It is the insidious foe that is hatching and nursing crime. Startling complication of statistics, obtained from the replies of over 1,000 prison governors in the United States to a circular letter addressed to them, and a summary shows that the general average of 909 replies received from the license states, gives the proportion of crime due to drink at no less than seventy-two per cent; the average from 108 officials in Prohibition states giving the per centage at thirtyseven. A considerable number of the latter were “boot-leggers” in jail for selling whiskey. Out of the 1,017 jailers, only 181 placed their estimate below twenty-five per cent, and fifty-five of these were from empty jails in prohibition territory. The relation of drink to pauperism is much the same as that of drink to crime. Of 73,045 paupers in all the almshouses of the country, 37,254 are there through drink.

According to official statistics as gathered by Commissioner Carroll D. Wright, of the Bureau of Labor, there are 140 cities in the country having a population of 30,000 and upwards.

In these cities there were in 1898, 294,820 people arrested for drunkeness, almost ten times as many as now comprise our army in the Philippines.

If this great army of drunkards were marshalled for a parade, marching twenty abreast, it would require four and one-half days, marching ten hours a day, for them to pass a given point. And these 295,000 drunks do not include the arrests for “disorderly conduct,” “assault” and a dozen other offences which grow out of the licensed rum business. The total arrests for all causes in these cities was 915,167. Counting the moderate estimate of three-fourths of these as being the victims of the lawful saloons, it would require more than a week’s marching twenty abreast, for the great procession to stagger past a reviewing stand, and the rum product of only 140 cities heard from.

These appalling statistics are the common property of every citizen, and any political party pretending to financial improvement that ignores the sixteen hundred million dollars worse than squandered in liquor and tobacco annually in the United states, is untrue to itself and false to the nation. Gambrinus, the god Bacchus, the Rum Power, this Moloch of perdition, must be destroyed. Prohibition is the only remedy. Kansas is to be the battle ground. Her constitutional prohibitory law and statutory enactments are all right, properly administered. But in the hands of a republican whiskey “machine” with the governor belonging to the Elks, a liquor fraternity; a confessed defaulter as state treasurer; a United states senator under indictment for bribery; officials from the state house to every county in complicity with the whiskey rebels, it will not be enforced. The liquor men and joint keepers subscribe large sums to campaigns with the tacit, implied or open understanding of immunity from prosecution and punishment on the part of candidates and officials. This has been going from bad to worse for twenty years. Yet the law is so plain that he who runs may read. How many ever saw it in print. The revised statutes of Kansas, 1901, Article 14, Section 2462, reads: “It shall be the duty of all sheriffs, police officers, constables, mayors, marshals, police judges and police officers of any city or town, having notice or knowledge of any violation of the provisions of this act to notify the county attorney of the fact of such violation and to furnish him names of witnesses within his knowledge by which such violation can be proven. If any such officer shall fail to comply with the provisions of this section, he shall, upon conviction, be fined in any sum not less than $100 or more than $500, and such conviction shall be a forfeiture of the office held by such person, and the court before whom such conviction is had shall, in addition to the imposition fine aforesaid, order and adjudge the forfeiture of his said office. For a failure or neglect of official duty in the enforcement of this act, any of the city or county officers herein referred to may be removed by civil action.”

Also Article 6, Section 2212, says: “Any officer of the state or of any county, city, district or township, after his election or appointment, and either before or after he shall have qualified or entered upon his official duties, who shall accept or receive any money or the loan of any money, or any real or personal property, or any pecuniary or other personal advantage, present or prospective, under the agreement or understanding that his vote, opinion, judgment or action shall be thereby influenced, or as a reward for having given or withheld any vote, opinion or judgment in any matter before him in his official capacity, or having wrongfully done or omitted to do any official act, shall be punished by a fine of not less than $200 nor more than $1,000, or by imprisonment for not less than one year nor more than seven years in the penitentiary at hard labor, or both such fine and imprisonment at the direction of the court.”

Enforce the statute and thousands of officials in Kansas would soon be behind prison bars. When the officiary administrative of any government become corrupt, it is on the highway to disruption and ruin. Greece and Rome are notable examples. The sworn government report is that nearly eighteen gallons of liquor to every man, woman and child, is consumed by Uncle Sam’s subjects every twelve months. This republic cannot long survive half sober and half drunk. The immortal Abraham Lincoln in a speech at Springfield, Ill., Feb. 22nd, 1842 said: “Turn now to the temperance revolution. In it we shall find a stronger bondage broken, a viler slavery manumitted, a greater tyrant deposed—in it, more of want supplied, more disease healed, more sorrow assuaged. By it, no orphans starving, no widows weeping; by it, none wounded in feeling, none injured in interest. And what a noble ally this to the cause of political freedom! With such an aid, its march cannot fail to be on and on, until every son of earth shall drink in rich fruition the sorrow-quenching draughts of perfect liberty! And when the victory shall be complete— when there shall be neither a slave nor a drunkard on the earth—how proud the title of that LAND which may truly claim to be the birthplace of and the cradle of both those revolutions that shall have ended in that victory! How nobly distinguished that people who shall have planted and nurtured to maturity both the political and moral freedom of their species!”

William Windom, when Secretary of the U. S. Treasury under the Arthur administration, said: “Considered socially, financially, politically or morally, the licensed liquor traffic is, or ought to be, the overshadowing issue in American politics, and the destruction of this iniquity stands first on the calendar of the world’s progress.”

By Bible authority and by the common law of our land I have proved to the satisfaction of all who will see the right, that I am a loyal American, a loving Home Defender, doing the will of Him whom I serve and whose I am.