I stood in the middle of the street and spoke in this way:  “I have destroyed three of your places of business, and if I have broken a statute of Kansas, put me in jail; if I am not a law-breaker your mayor and councilmen are.  You must arrest one of us, for if I am not a criminal, they are.”

One of the councilmen, who was a butcher, said:  “Don’t you think we can attend to our business.”

“Yes,” I said, “You can, but you won’t.  As Jail Evangelist of Medicine Lodge, I know you have manufactured many criminals and this county is burdened down with taxes to prosecute the results of these dives.  Two murders have been committed in the last five years in this county, one in a dive I have just destroyed.  You are a butcher of hogs and cattle, but they are butchering men, women and children, positively contrary to the laws of God and man, and the mayor and councilmen are more to blame than the jointist, and now if I have done wrong in any particular, arrest me.”  When I was through with my speech I got in my buggy and said:  “I’ll go home.”

The marshal held my horse and said:  “Not yet; the mayor wishes to see you.”

I drove up where he was, and the man who owned one of the dive-buildings I had smashed was standing by Dr. Korn, the mayor, and said:  “I want you to pay for the front windows you broke of my building.”

I said:  “No, you are a partner of the dive-keeper and the statutes hold your building responsible.  The man that rents the building for any business is no better than the man who carries on the business, and you are “particepts criminus” or party to the crime.”  They ran back and forward to the city attorney several times.  At last they came and told me I could go.  As I drove through the streets the reins fell out of my hands and I, standing up in my buggy; lifted my hands twice, saying:  “Peace on earth, good will to men.”  This action I know was done through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.  “Peace on earth, good will to men” being the result of the destruction of saloons and the motive for destroying them.

When I reached Medicine Lodge the town was in quite an excitement, the news having been telegraphed ahead.  I drove through the streets and told the people I would be at the postoffice corner to tell why I had done this.  A great crowd had gathered and I began to tell them of my work in the jail here, and the young men’s lives that had been ruined, and the broken hearted mothers, the taxation that had been brought on the county, and other wrongs of the dives of Kiowa; of how I had been to the sheriff, Mr. Gano, and the prosecuting attorney, Mr. Griffin; how I had written to the state’s attorney-general Mr. Godard, and I saw there was a conspiracy with the party in power to violate their oaths, and refuse to enforce the constitution of Kansas, and I did only what they swore they would do.  I had a letter from a Mr. Long, of Kiowa, saying that Mr. Griffin, the prosecuting attorney, was taking bribes, and that he and the sheriff were drinking and gambling in the dives at Kiowa.