"But who will pay the piper?" asked Ginsling.
"The Licensed Liquor Sellers' Association," answered Rivers. "The Association is bound to beat if it costs them a hundred thousand dollars. The hotel-keepers of this county will only have to pay their fee into the society, and it won't cost them a cent more; so you see we can afford to fight and be cheerful. And after we have bothered them and kept them from carrying out the law for six or seven months, having, in the meantime, deluged the county with whiskey, we will then start the cry that the Act is a failure; and any one who is at all acquainted with human nature knows that it will not be long before we will have thousands to join in the cry."
"Of course they will," said Bottlesby, "the great majority of those who vote for it will do so because it is fashionable. They don't care a cent who gets drunk so long as they don't lose anything. It happens that just now it is thought rather respectable to be on the side of temperance, and so they are voting for it; but in their hearts half of them hope it will fail, and they will not turn their fingers to make it a success. And if the plan which has been suggested by my friend, Rivers, is carried out, that is, to badger and bother them in every way we can, and at the same time to make this county, if possible, a perfect pandemonium of drunkenness and revelry, these parties will then eagerly join in the cry that the Act is a huge failure, and when we try to have the thing repealed they will give us their active support, because they will be able to assume the same role upon our side they did on the other, that is, that they are philanthropic citizens working on the side of morality and order. You mark my words, in a year from the present we will carry the repeal with an overwhelming majority."
The party broke up in the small hours of the morning, and the only one who was then sober was the landlord. In fact it was well understood, even among his cronies, that he was too mean to drink to any excess except he drank on the treats of his numerous customers; and then he was careful not to be so much under its influence as to neglect his business. He was one of those men of whom, alas! the world has too many, who live to satisfy their own selfish interest no matter who may be made to suffer.
CHAPTER XXIV.
ALDERMAN TOPER'S FLATTERING OPINION OF THE "DODGER."
The next week the "Licensed Liquor Sellers' Association" of the county held the meeting of which Rivers had spoken, and there were also representatives present from Toronto and other places. They all agreed that the plan outlined by Rivers would be the best to adopt; that was, if the reader recollects, to play a waiting game, and at the same time to treat the law with supreme contempt.
"I tell you what it is," said Alderman Toper, who was one of the representatives from the city—having been elected an alderman by the whiskey interest, for He was proprietor of the "Toper House," one of the largest second-class hotels in the city—"I will spend a thousand dollars of my own money in order in the end to beat them."
"Don't you think, Toper," said Rivers, "it would pay us to employ Gustavus Adolphus Dodger. I hear he is one of the best stump-speakers in the country, and that he can do as he likes with an average crowd What do you think? You know him better than I do."
"Yes," said Toper, in an undertone, "I know his face better than I do his dimes, for I have had the former at my bar every day for the last six months, though nary one of the latter have I seen. But 'he is just the man for Galway,' for all that. He is the aptest, smoothest, most oily rascal I have ever met, and there is not a man in Canada that can hold a candle to him as a speaker in his own line. Why, I remember at a certain meeting he addressed a crowd who had been shouting themselves hoarse against the man in whose behalf he was about to speak, but he pleaded so eloquently and plausibly for his friend—and he was the man's friend, because he had received a consideration—that, before he was through, they shouted as loudly for the one whose cause he was advocating as they had a few moments before for his opponent."