"A pension? And what might you get a pension for, friend?"
"For what you never can, as I judge."
"Indeed! And what is that?"
"For minding my own business."
Temperance began to have earnest advocates, men who, for the sake of their convictions, suffered unpopularity and persecution. A Quaker miller refused to grind grain for a distillery, and the owners brought a suit against him to compel him to do so. After a long and vexatious suit, the case was decided against him, but he persisted in his refusal, and the distillery was finally abandoned. Some would no longer comply with the old custom of furnishing liquor to their help in haymaking and to their neighbors who came to give a helping hand at bees, and by this infraction of ancient usage made themselves unpopular till a better sentiment prevailed.
There were zealots who cut down acres of thrifty orchard, as if there were no use for apples but cider-making. Through moral suasion and the honest example of good men, a great change was wrought in the sentiment of the people, till at last temperance became popular enough to become a matter of politics. Moral suasion was in the main abandoned, and the old workers dropped out of sight.
Vermont followed the lead of Maine in legislation for the suppression of the liquor traffic, and in 1852 passed a prohibitory law. Each succeeding assembly has legislated to increase the stringency and efficiency of the prohibitory statutes. Yet the fact remains that, after forty years' trial, prohibition does not prohibit, and presents the anomaly of an apparently popular law feebly and perfunctorily enforced.
It is a question whether the frequent and unnoticed violations of this law, and the many abortive prosecutions under it, have not made all laws less sacredly observed, and the crime of perjury appear to the ordinary mind a merely venial sin.
FOOTNOTES:
[99] Conant, Geography, History, and Civil Gov. of Vermont.