CHAPTER IX
President Judge
IN 1891 I had before me a case of Commonwealth vs.
Tierney. The defendant was charged with selling
liquor without a license and, it appeared, had made
the sale, as steward of a club which had been
incorporated as a social organization, to one of its members. The
club dues were merely nominal, the club property was very
meager, and the club was one of those corporations which
had sprung up all over the city, whose real purpose was no
doubt to furnish liquors. In an elaborate opinion reviewing
all of the authorities and working out all of the reasoning of
which the subject was capable, I held that a club had no
right, in the absence of a license, to sell liquors to its
members. The decision raised a great storm, for the reason
that the rich and influential likewise had their clubs, the
Union League, the Rittenhouse, the Philadelphia and many
more, and to deprive them of this concomitant of club life
was a serious matter. I had thought of its effect, but was
unable to draw any satisfactory distinction in principle
between the clubs of high and low life and took the responsibility.
The case went to the Supreme Court and there the
Chief Justice, E. M. Paxson, a worldly wise man who had
grown rich and later resigned his office to accept the Receivership
of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad, affirmed the
judgment, but put it on the ground that this particular
club was a fraud. Little by little the reasoning of my
opinion, which still seems to me unanswerable, was left
without support and the courts drifted into the conclusion
that the sale of liquor by a club to its members was in reality
not a sale but a process of equitable distribution. The result
