The Cambridge of eighteen hundred and ninety-six: a picture of the city and its industries fifty years after its incorporation
Arthur Gilman, Ed.

[92] under our statutes until the first of the following May. In the mean time a Law Enforcement Association was organized, with the paradoxical purpose of never enforcing the law; but, the rather, of fixing the responsibility upon the proper officers, of supplying them with information, of holding up their hands, of seeing that large praise came to them for all faithful work, and of focusing the intelligence and indignation of the city upon all dereliction of duty in this regard.

4. This was the state of affairs on Sunday, May 1, 1887, a day observed religiously by the churches as the first on which the city had escaped from its great enemy, an escape which has never yet been nullified.

The saloon-keepers, however, were cheerful. They held on to their leases, and threatened to bury us the next year. They reckoned on the precedent of such revulsions in other cities, where the thorough methods employed by us had not been in use.

Our leaders in this effort, as the next election drew near, went around among our principal citizens, asking, in the interest simply of fair play, more than seven months in which to try tile experiment; and so reasonable were our people, even many of those who doubted the wisdom of the permanent exclusion of the saloon, that they acceded to this request.

The same kind of campaign as that of 1886, only much further perfected in its details, was waged that year; and, though the conflict was tremendous, and each side polled nearly 1400 more votes than in 1886, the saloon was beaten the second year by the identical majority, 566, which had first abolished it. Then those very saloon-keepers, who had boastfully held on to their leases, hastened to get rid of them, and quit the city; and in the eight campaigns which have since ensued, the same stirring scenes have been reenacted, although each year has had its own distinctive issues in detail and its own unique and glorious fight.

5. But when the State at large, after two or three years, saw that the exclusion of the saloon had come to Cambridge to stay, straightway our city was thrust into the forefront, as that one community in the world of its size which had been able continuously, and by its own volition, to get the better of this great curse.

Consequently our literature, our speakers, our methods of