It is like heaven to live in a city where there are no open saloons.
There are thousands of public school children here, now nearly of age,
who have never seen here a beer-wagon or a beer-keg! Recently a child
who had never been out of the State, on going to Kansas City, Mo.,
looked out of the car window and saw a sign on a building, and spelled,
"S-a-l-o-o-n, saloon," and then exclaimed, "Mamma, what is that?"
There is no better city in the world in which to bring up a family of
boys than Topeka, and many fine eastern families are coming here for
that very reason. It amuses me to see the comments made on Kansas
in the East. To some it is truly, "The wild and woolly West." One
pastor writes: "Is it safe for the next General Synod to go out there?"
Let me tell your readers just two or three things about Kansas. Her
educational exhibit at the Chicago World's Fair took the highest prize;
her per cent of illiteracy is the lowest of all the States of the Union;
her regiment, the 21st of Kansas, was the only regiment of the 65,000 men
at Chickamauga Park during the late war with Spain in which every
man could write his own name on the muster roll; and this same regiment
voted unanimously not to have the infamous "canteen" in their
regiment, and they would not have it. This is the result of the influence
of twenty years of constitutional prohibition. Topeka has far better
paved streets and more of them than most other cities of its size in the
United States, its sidewalks are all brick, and this without a dollar coming
from bleeding the saloon in the shape of a license! Prosperity without
the saloon is seen on every hand.
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