Since sending my last article on the Nation temperance crusade, the writer has received a large number of letters thanking him for the article, many of which asked for a second article giving the results of the movement after it had spread over the State.  This is the only apology for my intruding a second time on your columns.  From these letters I find that the good people of the East do not and can not understand the situation here, because the laws and public sentiment here are so different from what they are in eastern States.  It seems strange to us to find many good people in the East indirectly supporting the saloon by their wholesale condemnation of a woman who has had the courage, nagged on by what she has suffered from the drink devil through a former drunken husband, to go right into the drink dens and smash their bottles and fixtures with a hatchet.  The smashing of joints and joint fixtures is at an end without doubt as far as Kansas is concerned, although Mrs. Nation still believes that that method of suppression of a public nuisance is the very best.  However, the effect of that smashing has been to marvelously stir up the officers of the law, our legislature, and public sentiment all over the State.  Mrs. Nation was let out of jail on the bond signed by Rev. J. B. McAfee, an esteemed member of my congregation here.  Her bond now is a bond to keep the peace, and her smashing is at an end.

The times were ripe for just such a movement.  The people of Kansas, through the indifference and neglect of her officers of the law, saw the jointists getting bolder every day, having their fines paid by the breweries and distilleries of other States, until they started in to give the State “open” saloons, with all the brazen ways in the East, Then Mrs. Nation came.  Everything was ripe for a reaction against all this.  The coming of this woman was simply the lighting of the match which set off a temperance pyrotechnic display which has lighted up the temperance horizon all over the Union, and has created an unparalleled degree of temperance sentiment and activity.  The writer has had Mrs. Nation at his table; has discussed with her her ideas; has differed with her as to the final utility of the “hatchet” as a cure for the disease; has one of the hundred of hatchets and axes sent her from all over the country, this a fierce broad-axe sent her from Hartsel, Col., and which he keeps as a souvenir; has investigated the charges as to her sanity, finds her entirely sane, though possibly somewhat of a crank because of her ultraradical methods in furthering reform against strong drink, tobacco, and other social evils; yet he feels that the temperance cause, despite all her faults, has much for which to thank Mrs. Nation.  It needed just such severe movements to arouse the easy-going masses of our State, and awaken public sentiment along these lines, and Mrs. Nation was the “John Brown” for the movement.