The movement in the city of Topeka, a city of 35,000 population, brought out a meeting of 3,000 men who demanded that liquors no longer be sold contrary to law, and that all joint fixtures be removed or they would be smashed.  This was promptly done.  It was a grand sight to see a dozen men carry down, from upstairs back rooms, long bars to be stored or sent out of the city.  What brought them down?  Public sentiment, the education resulting from twenty years of constitutional prohibition.  To-day the city of Topeka is absolutely free from joints, as far as the writer can see.  Of course, liquor can be bought secretly, and always will be, but our boys do not know where it can be bought.  You might as well try to absolutely bind the devil as to absolutely bind the liquor traffic in one State with all the brewers and distillers in a dozen surrounding States seeking with determined and cunning methods to extend their business within its borders.

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.  True, some people stay away from Kansas because of its stringent liquor laws.  That, however, largely accounts for the general intelligence here.  Let them stay away.  The West is all right educationally and morally.  Your readers may not know it, but the State which has the largest per cent of her population in her colleges is a western State.