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Path Breaking
a popular compromise between their own long-repressed mentality and their desire to perform some public act for which press, people and pulpit would praise and pat and pet and pay them. These facts, and more especially the last named, have so stimulated the repressed ambition of a few women that it has not been difficult for political cranks and professional agitators, who had previously been kicked out of the old parties, to secure their cat's-paw services in raking chestnuts for themselves from the fires of political controversy.
The stale argument, with which you have recently been regaled, that compares horse-stealing, against which we have prohibitory laws by common and undisputed consent, with liquor selling, using, or buying, about which there are many differences of opinion, is most unfair, since there are no laws against horse-selling, provided the purchaser is ready with the cash and the horse he wants to buy is all its owner claims for it. In like manner is the comparison between the prohibition of liquor-selling and the prohibition of murder unfair, since the sale of ropes, knives, guns and ammunition is not prohibited, except under certain conditions, to which all law-abiding people agree; nor are humanity and horses forbidden to exist because some men are murdered and many horses are stolen.
I frankly confess that if I were the Omnipotent Power with my finite conception of mundane things, 1 should not hesitate to prohibit everything that I believe to be evil. I should like to prohibit every form of intemperance, including self-righteousness, woe, want, war, poverty, excessive riches, murder, arson, slander, fever, contagion, lust, covetousness, drunkards, gluttony, lying, robbery, cruelty, theft,—everything that debases any element of our humanity; but since I can't, and God in His wisdom plainly teaches me that this is not His plan, I have  no desire,   nor  have  the  very  large  majority of