The Story of a Dark Plot | Page 9

punishment is lessened. Is it because they find too many
sympathizers at home?
Let those who doubt that this crime was undertaken because of the
temperance principles of its victim search the records of other localities
for parallel cases. Many earnest men and women have suffered for the
same cause. Satan never yields a foot of ground anywhere without
fighting vigorously to retain it, and no important reform was ever
inaugurated but it met with strong opposition from the first.
The more important a reform also, that is to say, the more it is opposed
to the rule of the powers of darkness, the more bitter the persecution is
likely to be which meets it at every step. Witness the fierce opposition
to the spread of Christianity in the early centuries and the persecution
which has almost always followed its introduction into a new,
neglected region. The temperance reform has been no exception in this
respect, and as a leading temperance worker has said: "The martyr-roll
of temperance is just as sacred as that of any other reform that was ever
inaugurated."
This same worker, Mr. J. C. Nichols, gives a sketch in this connection
which may be of interest to the readers of this narrative. It is of a young
man in New Orleans--a young man pure and earnest, such as the world
everywhere has need of. He was a zealous temperance worker, and had
met with considerable success in this work, which lay so near his heart.
One dark night, alone and unarmed, he was crossing a bridge beyond
which lay a clump of bushes. When he reached these bushes he was
confronted by six men with weapons who lay in ambush waiting for
him. They sprang out and shot him, and, not content with that, bruised
and battered his features beyond recognition. And then his noble
mother wrote to Miss Willard, President of the World's W. C. T. U.,
that she had yet two boys left, and she had rather they would die as he
had, fighting for the right, than that either of them should turn aside to
the right hand or the left.
These six men, attacking one defenceless temperance man, displayed
the same spirit of cowardice as their northern brethren show when they

hire a stranger to do the work for them. They had greater success
attending their efforts, but probably there was no more hatred or
revenge in their hearts than was in the hearts of the Brome County
liquor sellers when they sent to Massachusetts for a prize fighter to
come north to injure and perhaps kill a Christian temperance worker.
Through the providence of God, the plans of these men do not always
succeed, and when they do the real victory is often for God and the
right rather than for them, because no right-thinking man or woman can
but oppose them and their business when they see such fruits of the
traffic. North or south, the nature and effects of intemperance are ever
the same.
CHAPTER III.
THE AUTUMN COURT.
The Autumn Court of the District of Bedford was opened at
Sweetsburg, Que., on Thursday, August 30th, 1894, and at this session
the Sutton Junction Assault Case was considered. The lawyers in
charge of the case were H. T. Duffy, on behalf of the Alliance, and E.
Racicot, on behalf of the accused hotel keepers. The court room was
thronged each day with eager listeners, and much interest was evinced
both by the temperance and anti-temperance people.
The following account of proceedings at court and other matters
relating to the assault case is from The Templar, a temperance paper,
published in Hamilton, Ont., and a large part of this description was
also published in the Montreal Daily Witness:
"The excitement in Brome County, Quebec, over the arrest of several
prominent liquor sellers on the charge of conspiring to murder Mr. W.
W. Smith, President of Brome County Temperance Alliance, increases
as the developments are becoming known to the public. According to
the evidence, there remains no longer any question that Mr. Smith's
devotion to Prohibition, and particularly his determined stand for the
honest enforcement of the Scott Act, which is in force in that county,
made him a shining mark for the vengeance of the men whose trade and

profits were so seriously affected thereby. The confession of Walter
Kelly, the assailant, that he was employed to 'do up' Mr. Smith because
he was a man who gave the hotel keepers much trouble, and had to be
thrashed, as well as the payment of money by Mr. Jenne, proves the
animus of the assault, while the general evidence indicates a
wide-spread conspiracy, embracing others than the accused, to cause
the diabolical crime. The publicans of Brome, and, indeed, the liquor
traffic as