Smyrna Times

A Judicial Opinion on "Drummers."

In the trial of a suit before the Iowa Supreme Court, brought by a commercial traveler against a railway for being ejected from a train, Judge Hubbard, of Cedar Rapids, took occasion to denounce "drummers" in the following fashion: "It may be stated now, as a matter of history, that the court will take judicial notice of, that this class of men are the 'hardest lot' on earth. They monopolize all the best rooms in all the best hotels; they insult or sully all the chambermaids between Maine and the Gulf of Mexico and between the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans every month in the calendar year; they rush into the ladies' car on every railroad in the United States and Canada every day, and crowd into the seat of every respectable lady traveling alone, and insult her in five minutes afterward; they travel with harlots and make assignation houses of every Saturday night of every hotel in America; they have flirtations, intrigues and elopements with innocent, unsuspecting and respectable young girls in every city and village on the continent; they pursue virtue and goodness as sharks pursue a ship with the yellow fever—and still the kindest counsel thinks the conductors ought to be amiable enough to love them. There may be men in other callings who for a singular vice can challenge a comparison with commercial travelers but I have never seen them. But for a combination inharmonious blending, in dishonesty, impudence, cowardice, 'poistwronery,' treachery and all-round rascality of all varieties, they stand without a rival and without a peer,—The Hon. Judge Hubbard.