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Lay the jest about the julep 'neath the chestnut tree at

last,

For there's but one kind of moonshine and the olden days are past;

Now the water wagon rumbles through the southland on its trip

And it helps no one to drop off to pick up the driver's

whip.

For the mint beds make a pasture and the corkscrew hangeth high,

All is still along the stillside, and the South is going dry.

Victories

BY F. D. COBURN,

Secretary of Kansas State Board of Agriculture. Delivered in Chicago, Illinois, 1910.

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ROHIBITION was never before so popular in Kansas as now, after a thirty years' trial. Its effects upon all phases of society's welfare have been helpfully wholesome, and the aforetime noisy threats of resubmission are no longer heard, even in whispers. Something of its beneficent influence upon society may be discerned in the official statistics, disclosing that at the end of the last fiscal year twentyeight county poorfarms were without tenants; eightyseven had no insane inmates, and fifty-four had no feeble-minded inmates. Twenty-one counties had no convicts in the penitentiary, thirty-six had no prisoners in the reformatory, fifty-two had no prisoners serving sentence in their county jails, and sixteen counties were without a prisoner serving sentence in any institution. Statistics show further that Kansas, with practically a fifth of New York's population, has less than one-tenth the number of insane, and that Cook county, Illinois, furnishes more insane to the State hospitals and the institution at Dunning than the total population of all the

Kansas charitable, correctional and penal institutions combined. Unlike a sister State, Kansas has no boast that hers "is the largest penitentiary in the world."

Prohibition is in the air; its invincible hosts, on the way, are being augmented by reinforcements at every crossroads. Ably led, the forces of rebellion made a long and stubborn resistance to our national authority, but their banners trailed in defeat at Appomattox before the blue-coated legions of Grant. The forces that behind saloon bars are in rebellion against society and morality are facing their Appomattox, for which Chicago may be a synonym.

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Not his Business

WEALTHY man in St. Louis was asked to aid in a series of temperance meetings, but he refused, saying, "Gentlemen, it is not my business.”

A few days later his wife and two daughters were coming home on the lightning express. In his fine carriage he rode to the depot, thinking of his business and planning for the morrow.

"Accident?"

There are many railroads centering in St. Louis. Yet it troubles him. It is his "business" now. The horses are stopped. He finds the accident has occurred twentyfive miles distant on the road on which his loved ones were returning. He 'phones to the superintendent:

"I will give you five hundred dollars for an extra engine."

"Can't let you have it."

"I will give you one thousand dollars for an engine." "A train with surgeons and nurses has already gone forward, and we have no other."

He

With white face the man paces the station to and fro. It is his business now. In half an hour, perhaps, which seems to him half a century, the train arrives. hurries toward it, and in the tender finds the mangled and lifeless remains of his wife and one of his daugh

ters. In the car following lies his other daughter, with her body crushed and her life ebbing slowly away.

A pint of whiskey, imbibed by a railroad employee fifty miles away, was the cause of the catastrophe. Who dares to say of this tremendous question, “It is not my business?"-The Illinois Issue.

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The Supreme Issue

BY JAMES C. FERNWALD.

LUNDERING through the night and firing upon visionary foes, the Baltic fleet of Russia shot to death two English fishermen on the dark waters of the North Sea, and all England arose with a shout for war. Those workingmen must be avenged. England's fleet in the Mediterranean cleared decks for action, and waited with shotted guns off Gibraltar. Every British ship around the world held itself ready for battle at a word. Woe to the power that recklessly destroys an English life!

Woe to the liquor power that recklessly destroys 100,000 American lives every year! For the saving of life among our people the downfall of the man-destroying saloon is the supreme issue of to-day.

Beyond even life is that for which life may, if there is need, be well laid down-that grand something which we call CHARACTER. Given that, and neither war, pestilence, nor famine can destroy a nation. It rises from every misfortune, elastic, enduring, triumphant. Without that, no prosperity nor fleets nor armies can save a nation. Its own dry rot eats out the substance of its greatness, and Goths, Huns, and Vandals, barbarians from anywhere, have but to put out their hands to crush the empty shell.

For characters, how stands the question of the saloon? Who needs to argue that? Why attempt the superfluous task of proving that the saloon is bad, demoralizing, degrading? To save American character we must destroy the American saloon.

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Character of the Saloon

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BY JAMES C. FERNWALD.

LL thoughtful publicists are coming to see that the problem of our civilization is our cities. They are applied at the prevalence of crime and vice in those central aggregations of humanity which are yet to rule the nation. They are shocked at the precocity of wickedness, the number of juvenile criminals and desperadoes. They hunt in libraries and bookstores for dime novels as the cause. The cause is the saloon. You may, indeed, have criminals without saloons, but you cannot have saloons without criminals. When you sow saloons thick among a population, you must reap a harvest of crime.

The saloon produces crime and vice by the alcohol it administers, which, as physiologists now know, deadens the higher, finer faculties, last evolved in the march of evolution, and hence most easily dethroned, while it stimulates the lower instincts, the long inheritance of barbarism ever struggling to control, and needing only to be unleashed-to have the restraints of judgment and conscience removed-in order to become resistless. The saloon produces vice and crime by the companionship it gathers, and saturates with its deadly atmosphere. There, sooner or later, the vicious, and the criminal resort, the innocent are made wicked, and the wicked are made morse. To suppress the saloon is the supreme concern of our imperiled cities.

The pastoral letter of the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore, in 1884, made the following declaration: "We call upon all pastors to induce all of their flocks that may be engaged in the sale of liquors to abandon the dangerous traffic as soon as possible, and to make their living in some more honorable way."

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Women and the Saloon*

BY SAMUEL DICKIE.

PEN wide the doors and admit that glorious company of women, a million strong, who come from every quarter of the globe. See them press eagerly to the front, singing as they come. A bow of white ribbon is on every breast. This is the splendid army, the hopeful host, the swordless warriors of a winning battle, the Woman's Christian Temperance Union. How shall we divide these? I want to be fair. I mean to be generous, but I cannot put a stain on the brow of one member of this galaxy of mothers and sisters and wives and sweethearts. No, Mr. Mayor, not one of this company in all the earth will stand with your saloonkeepers and bartenders and gamblers, not one of this elect host will contribute a word or an ounce of influence to save the saloon from the hell to which it ought to go. They will use their best endeavor to save the saloonkeeper and his victim, but for the saloon they carry the black flag that means no quarter, and they will yet walk at the funeral of the Godless thing.

Here comes another company of women, ten thousand, twenty thousand, fifty thousand, a hundred thousand of them, the poor, unfortunate and unhappy victims of man's inhumanity to woman. God forbid that I should speak of them in other than the tone of sympathy and the accent of sorrow, for they present the most pitiful sight on which the eye can rest. But how will this miserable and motley company divide? Will they all go yonder? No, a few with streaming eyes and heaving bosoms and trembling limbs will throw themselves into the arms of the white ribbon women and beg for another chance, and get the help they seek. The great majority, some gladly, some heedlessly, some reluctantly, will range themselves on the other side and stand for vice because, God pity them, because they think they must.

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*From the Chicago debate with Mayor Rose of Milwaukee.

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