After a while the friends of this young man buried him.  The doctors gave his sickness a respectable name, and reported that he had died of such a disease as decent people may die of, but his friends, with heart-breaking sorrow, knew they were burying a man who had died of a drunken debauch.

I have spoken freely of the evils wrought by our border troubles; but now we had to realize that, taking all the men murdered in our early feuds, and comparing them with the men murdered by strong drink in the city of Atchison, counting man for man, there have been more men murdered by strong drink than by all our border troubles.  There have been more women that have had their hearts broken, more children turned into the streets, more fortunes squandered, in the single city of Atchison than in all the Kansas war.  But there is another point of comparison.  The men who wrestled with each other in that early conflict verily thought they were right.  They may have been mistaken, but they thought they were in the right; they therefore maintained their own self-respect.  But those who have died in this battle of the bottles and the beer glasses have lost everything—­self-respect, reputation, honor, everything; and they went to the dogs and their souls went to perdition.

I have been a somewhat voluminous writer on many subjects now for forty years, but all this would scarce exceed in amount what I have written in Kansas newspapers, during a series of years, on the single subject of temperance.  Besides, I spent much time in lecturing, for the welfare of the church and of the nation was at stake; and yet, what was done by myself was only a drop in the bucket compared with what went to make up, year after year, a great agitation.  At length the people became so aroused that the lawmakers at Topeka came to understand that something must be done in the way of temperance legislation; and they gave us a local option law.  But crafty politicians obtained that cities of the first and second class should be exempted.  This was nothing but mockery.  The cities were the very places where the law was most needed, for men from the country went into the city and there they encountered their old enemy, the saloon.  And so we kept up the agitation, and demanded that the saloon should be prohibited throughout the State.  At length the pressure became so great that the politicians understood a second time that something must be yielded to the popular demand, and they tried another dodge.  They said:  “We will give you the privilege to vote an amendment to the constitution incorporating prohibition into the constitution of the State.”  This would at least put off the evil day for two years, for it would take two years before such an amendment could go into operation.  But here again was seen the usual treachery.  The amendment to be voted on read as follows:  “The manufacture and sale of intoxicating liquors shall be forever prohibited in this State, except for medical, scientific and