p. 71 | A Judge's Sentence

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · Feb 22, 1877

A Judge's Sentence.

In passing sentence upon some liquor dealers in the State of Iowa recently, Judge Hibbard addressed them concerning their crimes in the following words which can but commend themselves to the good judgment of all:—

While there are greater crimes known to the law, which are punishable with great severity, there are none which involve more of those qualities known as despicable meanness and audacity than the selling of intoxicating liquors.

There is something in the taking of human life by violence so instantaneous that it shocks and terrifies the minds of all, and yet we look upon the man who takes human life quite as surely, but by a slow, lingering process, if not without condemnation, at least without horror. You who stand before the court for sentence are in every moral sense murderers, and you are in the spirit, if not in the letter, guilty of manslaughter; for the law says that whoever accelerates the death of a human being unlawfully is guilty of the crime. Your bloated victims upon the witness stand, and who undoubtedly committed perjury to screen you from the law, not only abundantly testify that you are accelerating death, but that you are inducing men to commit still greater crimes than your own.

You still maintain the appearance of respectability, but how morally leprous and scrofulous you are inwardly, the ruin, poverty and idleness which you are inflicting upon this community declare as from the house tops. You are living in idleness and eating the bread of orphans, watered with widow's tears. You are stealthily killing your victims and murdering the peace and industry of the community, and thereby converting happy, industrious homes into misery, thriftless poverty and rags. You are sowing the seeds of ignorance, and idleness, and want among the generations to come.

Anxious wives and mothers watch and pray in tears nightly with desolate hearts for the coming home of your victims, whom you are luring with the wiles and smiles of the devil into midnight debauchery.

In fine, one can have no adequate conception of a cataract until he sees Niagara, nor of the terrible fury and grandeur of a storm in mid-ocean until he has witnessed one; so no one can know the utter degradation and total depravity to which his species can be brought until he looks upon the desolate ruin caused by your hellish traffic.

You are persistent, defiant law-breakers, and shamelessly boast that in defiance of law and moral sense of the community you will continue in your wicked and criminal practices.

It has now become the imperative duty of this court to let fall upon you so heavily the arm of the law, that you shall either be driven from your nefarious traffic or ruined in your fortunes or wicked prosperity. You have become a stench to the nostrils of the community, and all good men are praying that you may be speedily reformed or summarily destroyed. By the providence of God and the favor of this court, these prayers shall be speedily answered by signal and exact justice for your crimes. This court will feel a proud satisfaction in taking from you by law your ill-gotten gains, and giving it to the common school fund of this county, where, let us hope, it will assist in educating the rising youth to shun your vices and wicked practices.

And, finally, let me entreat you, if you are not lost to every sentiment of humanity, to desist from your criminal, vagabond traffic and betake yourselves to some honest calling for a livelihood, and you may yet become a virtuous, useful citizen, and entitled to the respect of a Christian community; while if you persist in this way, your own ruin is certain and you will receive as you deserve, the execration of mankind.

You may think that the sentence of the court is harsh and unjustly severe, but the court assures you that, compared with your crimes and the desolation you have already brought upon the community, it is mild in the extreme.