The Call of an Epoch (Classic Reprint) - Softcover

John G. Woolley

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1331383366 ISBN 13: 9781331383369

Publisher: Forgotten Books, 2019

Synopsis

Excerpt from The Call of an Epoch

It went into a legislative district where the popular senti ment was strongly Christian, strongly Republican, and strongly dry, and approached the dominant political leaders in private and the masses in public meetings, with substantially this proposi tion, This is a Republican district. You have the right to keep it so, if you can. But it is a dry district and entitled to a dry representative in the legislature. I have no purpose, or desire, to help the Democrats, as against you. But you must be fair to the dry sentiment. Nominate a dry Republican and if the oppo sitiou does the like, I keep hands off. If a wet Democrat is put up, I will support you with a corps of dry Democrats. On the other hand, if vou name a wet Republican against a dry Demo crat, I will support the Democrat with a battery of dry Republi can speakers and in time we will beat you. This is no threat. It is simply good politics for both parties in any case.

Very soon, in multiplying districts, we had Republicans and Democrats competing for the dry support. Party lines grew dim as the light of Christian patriotism brightened, and Church lines disappeared altogether, as to Prohibition. The temperance socie ties ran together under the new leadership, as hope and the joy of clean conflict revived in the hearts of Christian voters. Small victories were consolidated into larger advances, local gains began to affect larger units and presently, State Legislatures took action and on the sixteenth of January, 1920, the clutch was shifted into high gear and the Church, with every cylinder hitting, was eating the road.

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Product Description

Excerpt from The Call of an Epoch This Preface is, of course, a postscript. It is also quite superfluous, since the motif of these and all of my many public speeches is aggressively obvious and monotonously recurrent. It is prefixed here with the same idea - whatever it is - that musical composers have, who finish with a rush at the same chord they began with, but louder. My old friend of other years, Thomas Fitch, a great man, who would have got a high place in our history if he had not known so much, once made a petulant but friendly comment on my mental equipment. He had brought an ominous looking lawsuit against a rich client of mine and appeared at the trial with a wonderful brief. I had none, but beat him promptly and conclusively. As we walked away together from the Court House, he said: "It is of no use to be a good lawyer. I knew all the learning of that case, from Moses to the morning paper, and you didn't know anything except where to kick me." At my first survey of the case against the liquor traffic I saw precisely where to kick it. The Church was the logical plaintiff and it was an ollapodrida of temperamental temperance societies I that made merely a number of slight ripples in the main stream! of liquor power, without checking or disturbing it. Like the old* woman that lived in a shoe, she had so many children she didn't know what to do, while the liquor traffic was a compact, fighting political profiteer, with a single political issue, a perfectly definit program and no party, no pity, no patriotism and no conscience The temperance societies and evangelists were doing a noble work and, in a small way, successfully. But the scale of operation was the same as that of the benevolent Samaritan who, on his way somewhere else, gave first aid to one of many victims of a band of thieves who themselves would not have resented the charity. And while they towed one derelict to the inn of abstinence, the licensed saloon beat up and robbed a dozen more. It was l

Edition details

• Publisher: Forgotten Books
• Publication date: 2019
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1331383366
• ISBN 13: 9781331383369
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 257