oisining people mit candy, he goes to work to get up the Harris Fine
Association and gives all the eighteen-dollar-a-week policemen in the
neighborhood to understand that it's equivalent to ten dollars in their
pockets if they wouldn't take it so particular when members of the
Harris Fine Association commits a little thing like murder or something,
_verstehst du mich_, why the people in the same block which wasn't
members of the Harris Fine Association would begin to think that candy
was getting to have a bad influence on the neighborhood, y'understand.
Then if Harris Fine was to run for alderman and all the loafers of the
eighth ward or whatever ward he was alderman of was to meet in the back
room of his candy-store, Mawruss, the respectable _Leute_ which couldn't
go past Harris Fine's candy-store without hearing somebody talking
rotten language would go home and say that it was a shame and a disgrace
that the eighth ward should got to have candy-stores in it. Afterward
when he has been an alderman for some time, Mawruss, and Harris Fine
begins to make a fortune out of the garbage-removal contracts by not
removing garbage, y'understand, and also as a side line to candy and
ice-cream soda, does an elegant business in asphalt-paving which
contains one-tenth of one per cent. asphalt, y'understand, the bad
reputation which candy has got it in the eighth ward is going to spread
throughout the city, Mawruss, and finally, when the candy feller starts
in to make contracts for state roads, candy gets a black eye in the
state also, and it's only a question of time before the candy-dealer
would go to Washington and put over a rotten deal on the national
government, understand me, and then people like you and me which never
touches so much as a little piece of peanut-brittle, Mawruss, starts
right in and hollers for the national prohibition of all kinds of candy
from gum-drops to mixed chocolates and bum-bums at a dollar and a half a
pound."

"You may be right, Abe," Morris said, "but when it comes right down to
Bright's disease and charoses of the liver, y'understand, politics
'ain't got nothing to do with it, because it doesn't make no difference
to whisky whether a feller voted for Wilson _oder_ Hughes. It would just
as lieve ruin the health and prospects of a Republican as a Democrat."

"Whisky might," Abe admitted, "but how about beer and light wines,
Mawruss, which you know as well as I do, Mawruss, a loafer must got to
dri