Wendell Phillips, Theodore C. Pease, Speeches, Lectures and Letters of Wendell Phillips: Volume 1

“ [517] something almost as bad, and to appoint our own police; please instruct your police to keep out of our ward.” We should not say this was democratic. We should say, that as far as the interest of a community in a law extends, just so far that community has a right to a hand in the execution of it. Now the State of Massachusetts feels an interest in the execution of the Maine Liquor Law. We have a sixth of the population and a third of the wealth of the State. Do the influences of these stop with the people who sleep on this peninsula? Does not our influence radiate in every direction? Do not twenty thousand men do business here, but not sleep here? A third of the wealth! Who owns it? We that sleep here? Not at all. These costly railroad depots, these rich banks, these large aggregates of property, who owns them? Why, the men that live ten, twenty, thirty miles outside of the city limits, and come in here in crowds the first of January, April, July, and October, to get their dividends. Men who have millions invested on this peninsula no interest in knowing whether the streets are safe l Sending their sons into our streets,--no interest in their being morally wholesome! Trusting their lives here,--no interest in their being safe!

A fortnight ago, a woman, a teacher in a country town within twenty miles of Boston, missed her father,--an honest, temperate farmer, though not a teetotaler. He came to the city to sell cattle, and had received five hundred dollars. He had been gone a week, and she came down to the city to hunt him up. She traced him from spot to spot, and finally found that the grog-shops had got hold of him, made him drunk, taken his money, kept him drunk three days, so that a convenient policeman might see him that number of times and complain of him as a common drunkard, and he had gone to the House of Correction for three months. Has that town