real business basis.

"Let the churches, the grange, the radicals, the liberals, the hotel
men, the liquor men, all send their delegates. Let that assemblage take
thought on a plan which will lift out of politics a question that
doesn't belong there. Let's end civil war on this question. Give the
young men some other picture as their eyes open on the politics of this
State."

It was the earnest, ingenuous appeal of one crying out of the wilderness
of human uncertainty--of one who saw the evils in those attempts of men
to curb greed and appetite--of one earnestly seeking a remedy, but not
clearly understanding that so long as the world shall endure, with men
and women weak and human, some problems must remain unsettled.

"I'll suggest a place for that convention," muttered Thelismer Thornton
to those who stood about him. "Hold it in Purity Park in Paradise!
Settle the rum question!" he sneered. "Noah hadn't been stamping around
on dry ground long enough to get his quilts aired out before he was
drunk on Noah's Three Star! And Japheth probably got mad and passed a
prohibitory law and thought he had the trouble fixed forever."

When the legislature finally adjourned the protestations that had been
wrung out of it promised much in the way of honest reorganization.

Harlan Thornton remained with Governor Waymouth for a time. His
Excellency found him indispensable.

The commissions were at work.

Office-holders whined, taxpayers squirmed. Honesty was greeted
everywhere by wry faces.

But the "Thornton law," its deputies superseding county and city
authority, was the bitterest political pill of all. The results
discouraged the righteous--Governor Waymouth predicted them accurately
with the old-age cynicism of one who understood human nature. The
flagrantly open places were closed. But innumerable dives thereby
secured the business which had gone to the open places in the days of
toleration. An army could not have closed the dives--the proprietors of
which, in most cases, carried their villanous concoctions on their
persons. Express companies were organized for the sole purpose of
dealing in liquors by the parcel system, and the State's liquor
agencies, established under the protection of the prohibitory law
itself, were besieged by patrons who stood in queues of humanity like
buyers at a theatre ticket-window.

Reformation of human nature by mere statute was a failure!

But mere political disaster did not daunt th