The other mused a moment, his pallid, scholarly face averted. "I'll tell you, if you like," he said at length. "But you will understand that I challenge no one else's convictions. I assume to sit in judgment only upon my own."
Craig nodded. "Of course."
"I made the connection we are speaking of," continued the Judge, "when I was a young man, just beginning practice. The liquor problem was young then too. Communities did not take it too seriously—particularly in the south where drinking was a matter of course with gentlemen. The white-ribbon movement was in its infancy and John B. Gough had hardly been heard of. To me—to the men I knew—the 'temperance' agitation seemed a mere recurring fad, fostered by pious and well-meaning persons, which cropped up—a kind of moral seven-year locust—at periodic intervals. People lived more or less as their grandfathers had lived before them on their plantations. And their fathers had been fox-hunting, hard-living 'three-bottle men' right down to the war. I had all the habits and prejudices of my class. Liquor seemed to me like many another thing that was made to minister to individual weakness, but was not in itself obnoxious. And the decanter was never empty on my side-board. Yet even then the new element in politics and in every-day life—the sentiment against liquor—was growing. Times were slowly changing, men's outlook was changing, and I knew—long before I admitted it to myself—that I was a part of an industry which the best thought of the community no longer approved, and that men who championed it were swimming against a deepening and strengthening social current. I was stubborn, but at last there came a day when I—changed too."
His voice had softened, had suddenly become surcharged with feeling. He leaned over the table and caught up a small oval photograph, set in a black-leathern frame. It was a picture of his son Chisholm, as a boy of perhaps fourteen. He held it out in a hand that slightly trembled:
"That is why I changed, Craig. One night Chilly came home—drunk. I had never seen him intoxicated, had never guessed that he could so far forget himself. He was a mere boy, at school! In that moment the sharp truth came to me. Shame stared at me from my own door-step. I saw the text of the sermon that had been preached into my deaf ears—in my own son!"
He broke off abruptly and set the picture back on the table. When he spoke again his voice was more even:
"That hour, as I sat here in this same room, I—saw. Could anything else have opened my eyes? Perhaps not. But that did. I saw all at once what I had been bolstering. It was no longer a theoretical question of the harm of the club-bar and the corner saloon to the community. They were making a drunkard of Chilly! The Trust furnished their stock-in-trade. And I had been the Trust's paid tool—a part of its brain in this state—had guarded it from error, shown how far it could go with impunity under the law, had even made possible its organisation as it exists to-day! I, Chilly's father! That night I wrote out my resignation as counsel. I mailed it before I slept."
There was a slight pause. Craig's lowering look had been watching the other curiously. The emotion in the older man's voice had touched no chord of response in him. Rather it roused contempt—not for the son, whom he considered a brainless weakling, but for what seemed to him an arrant attempt to evade the issue that stood so sharply and insistently in his own mind. To him no man's motives were pure. The man before him had been not the Trust's servant, but its creature. Had not the Corporation, behind all, set him on his high seat? Was he fool enough to think that he—Craig—was not aware of that? It had expected him to pay in kind, when the need arose, as now it had. And did the other think to throw dust in his eyes with such mawkish sentimentalism—to evade this old tacit obligation by a flimsy pretence of moral scruple? Craig spoke:
"And—the Corporation. What did it say? Eh?"
"The president of the board came to see me. He was good enough to ask me to reconsider. But I had made my choice."