After he had been for a while a school teacher, he became a
lawyer, resident in Atchison, and finally became a politician. He was
talented, social, companionable and ambitious, and soon made himself a
man of mark, and was petted and courted by the people, and was the
idol of his father and mother. All this brought him much into company.
But at that time the brewers and saloonkeepers exercised a despotism
over the politicians and public men of the city as absolute as is the
despotism of the Czar over the Russians. But there was this
difference: instead of being slaves to a great monarch, these
politicians were tools and lick-spittles to a set of coarse, brutal,
low-bred liquor dealers, who were exceptionally ignorant, degraded and
vile. These wretched and vicious corrupters of the public morals
insisted on controlling every caucus, and that the candidates, of
whatever party, should be men well pleasing in their sight. If not,
then the fat was in the fire, and the candidate was forthwith
slaughtered.
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