k mostly useless and wicked.

"Boston's devil-fish was dragging her down." The Sunday laws were set
at defiance. The clinking of glasses could not only be distinctly
heard as one went by, but the streams of young men openly filed in.
The laws, requiring a certain distance between the schoolhouse and the
saloon, were persistently violated. Of two hundred saloons visited by
Carleton, one hundred and twenty-eight had set the law at defiance.
While six policemen were needed in one Salvation Army room, to keep
the saints and sinners quiet, often there would be not one star or
club in the saloons.

Carleton began by arming himself with the facts. He visited hundreds
of the tapster's quarters in various parts of the city. In some cases
he actually measured, with his own hands and a surveyor's chain, the
distance between the schoolhouse and the home-destroyer. He talked
with scores of policemen. He then prepared his bill and reported it
in the Judiciary Committee, the members of which, about that time,
received a petition in favor of a non-partisan metropolitan board of
police commissioners, in order to secure a much better enforcement of
law. On this petition were scores of names, which the world will not
willingly let die. Yet, after reading the petition, seven of the
eleven members of the Committee were opposed to the bill, and so
declared themselves. Carleton was therefore obliged to transfer the
field of battle to the open House. When he counted noses in the
Legislature, he found that in the double body there were but four men
who were heartily in favor of the apparently unpopular reform. The
bill lay dormant for many weeks. Almost as a matter of course, the
Sunday newspapers were bitterly hostile to it. They informed their
readers, more than once, that the reform was dead. By hostile
politicians the bill was denounced as "infamous."

Nevertheless, the minority of four nailed their colors to the mast,
"determined, if need be, to sink, but not to surrender." Behind them
were the State constitution, the statutes of the General Court, and
the whole history of Massachusetts, whose moral tonic has so often
inspired the beginners of better times in American history. When the
day came for discussion of the bill, in public, Mr. Coffin made a
magnificent speech in its favor, March 17, 1885. Despite fierce
opposition, the bill finally became law, creating a new era of hope
and reform in the City on the Bay.

In a banquet given