And so the money of the good citizens of Utah is being spent on such opera-bouffé trials—and they continue to stand for it.
A delightful state of affairs, my masters. Such incidents should get into the papers more frequently. For we can all stand anything but ridicule. And when the law is thus made ridiculous, it is to laugh, isn’t it?
Or should one remain serious in the face of such nonsense—as of course the reformers would have us do.
Well, I am afraid they will have to pass laws against smiling before I can be brought to terms. And even then I may break another law—and go to jail for it. Or more likely remain peacefully at home, as I do now, breaking so many that I have stopped counting them.
I fear that I break the speed laws—as do you. I am afraid that most of us do. Yet I am not conscious of good ladies of any N. S. L. S. (National Speed Law Society) giving up tea-parties that they may get out on the highways to watch us, and report us, and, if need be, arrest us themselves. Yet when you and I dine at a restaurant in a city like New York, we are apt to note a policeman in uniform standing in the doorway, his eagle eye upon us, to see that we do not take flasks from our pockets. I wonder what would happen if, under the very nose of this representative of law and order, one should pour from a bottle some harmless iced-tea. Alas! I fear that the law is not to be trifled with in that way. The dignity of our jurisprudence must not be disturbed. One might be hauled up and arraigned for disorderly conduct, or for some such trumped-up charge.
But it is a pretty picture, isn’t it, to see perfectly good tax-payers watched and spied upon while they eat their meals? Ye gods! and in a supposedly free country! How our ancestors must turn in their graves—they who wrote something, didn’t they, about “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”?
Who shall define that last phrase today? I wonder what it means—what anything means—in these topsy-turvy times.
Not long ago, in solemn conclave in an eastern city, a holy body of men and women aroused the whole country to its first volume of fury by suggesting that gatling-guns be used to enforce obedience to the Prohibition law. In their fanatical zeal, they were seriously for murdering a number of us, and they saw no humor in their announcement. What were a few lives, if the LAW was upheld?—a law, by the way, which millions of thinking people do not believe should ever have been put upon our statutes. No more shameful resolution was ever made at a public meeting; yet I would not have been surprised had it been passed, to such a state of imbecility have we come. Why stop where we are? Let the digging in go on; let the teeth of the law sink into your flesh until we groan in agony. Let the busybodies and the cranks become as thick as flies and locusts in time of pestilence. Let them gather in battalions around us, sting us, flay us, torture us—until at last the vestige of manhood which is left in us may cause us to turn upon them.
I fear that the law which makes it illegal for a minor to be admitted to a theater or a motion-picture palace is broken every day in every city of our broad and beneficent land. Yet I do not find pickets from Children’s Societies, standing about to see that the letter of the law is obeyed. We pretend to be deeply interested in the welfare of the coming generation—so interested, in fact, that the present generation is forced to give up its harmless toddy, that the children of tomorrow may be robust supermen and superwomen.
The fact is that, to the fanatic, no law is sacred except the Eighteenth Amendment.