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N 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 228