The Redwood gazette. [volume] (Redwood Falls, Minn.) 1873-1940, 1924-12-31
"A Judge Who
Showed the Way

Judge Page Morris, whose death
marks the passing of notable figure
from the stage of Minnesota's public
life, had many fine qualities, but the
finest of these was his fearless. Judge
Morris will be remembered as a keen
intellect, as an attorney of parts, as
an able and alert Congressman, as
learned and fair jurist and as a per-
sonable and amiable gentleman, but
most of all he will be remembered as
that dispenser of justice who put the
real fear of the law into the hearts
of Minnesota bootleggers and taught
them that the prohibition statutes
were to be no more lightly f1outed
than the Federal enactments against
counterfeiting, or mail robbery, or
treason.
AS State after State joined the Dry
there had grown up among the frat
ernity engaged in illicit liquor sell
ing the belief that it's members were
engaged in a special class of law de-
fance immune against destruction.
Punishments were meted out by
courts, but somehow these punish
ments failed to stop the bootlegging.
Political influence, Wet community
sentiment, the laws delays-all these
were relied upon to keep the purveyor
of contraband drink from getting
what was coming to him.
So when the liquor drouth became
nationwide under Federal Prohibi-
ton, it was not unnatural for 'the
I1S no
true in the group of Dry states, would
also be true under the new National
status. Fines that could be paid off
by two or three days of uninterrupt-
ed business, thirty-day terms that
could be served in comfortable jails
by hired proxies, trials delayed until
the evidence should be lost, appeals
that could "ride" indefinitely on
crowded court calendars these
were relied upon by the Prohibition
nullifers to make possible the con-
tinuance, in modified form, of the So
called good old days"
Right blithely did the boys set about
converting erstwhile saloons into
"soft drink BARS" in which really
soft drinks were regarded more as
theatrical properties than as goods
kept for sale. Choice upstairs loca-
tions were leased and deliberately fit
ted up as clubs-clubs with marvel
ously elastic membership rolls, clubs
whose social and fraternal activities
obviously were to be confined chiefly
to consumption of more or less dubi-
Gus intoxicants. And there was here
and there brewery, equipped with
permit to make beer and de-alco-
holize it for beverage purposes, that
forgot the Decentralization part of
the process. All was we'll with the
underworld. Prohibition wasn't such
bad thing after all, 'the boys"
agreed.
Then came Judge Page Morris to
hold court, and things began to hap
pen. Fines, large as they were, were
mere incidentals, the fancy trimmings
of impressive Jail sentences, terms
measured not by days, but by months,
sometimes years. In time, for it ma
turally took time, bootleggers, blind
p'ggers, rum-runners, sneak brewers,
and all the rest, learned that the Pro-
hibition law was just as sacred, just
as fearsome, as those older Federal
statutes that had to do with equally
older offenses.
This thing the Vets always had
called impossible actually could be
done, the country found.
Page Morris, perhaps more than
any other individual, was responsible
for demonstrating to the Nation that
law is law, that even a law that is
unpopular with a substantial minori-
ty can be enforced, that an evil even
as strongly entrenched as the boot
Logging evil can be reduced to rela-
tive minimum.-M Minneapolis Journal.