"The buildings, premises and paraphernalia of a nuisance are not legitimate property and have no rights in law. Damages cannot be recovered for their destruction by an individual. The question of malice does not enter into the case at all."
I 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 thirty- seven. 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 alms- houses 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.