If prohibition is a failure in Kansas as license advocates charge, then governors, ex-governors, attorney generals, jailers, mayors and judges of Kansas are falsifiers.  If prohibition is a failure in Kansas why has the state grown to be the richest per capita in the Union, why are so many jails empty, so many counties without a pauper and why, according to the brewers’ year book of 1910, was the consumption of liquor in Kansas one dollar and sixty cent per capita and in a neighbor license state twenty-two dollars per capita?

Along with the absurd statement that prohibition is a failure, comes the warning of the president of the Model License League to the business men of the country, that unless the tide of prohibition is arrested it will “kill our cities.”  “Blessed are the dead that die in the Lord.”

In a local option contest a prominent business man said to me:  “I do not use liquor but I am in doubt about how I should vote on the question.”  When I asked; “What’s your trouble?” he answered:  “We have six saloons in this little city and the license fee is one thousand dollars; how are we to run the city without the six thousand dollars?” When I informed him that the six saloons took from the people eighty thousand dollars a year, he agreed it was a reasonable estimate.  I said:  “Don’t you know those who spend their money for drink, if they did not spend it over the saloon bars, would spend it over the counters of merchants who sell clothing, food, fuel and furniture?” If you merchants could take in eighty thousand dollars, couldn’t you pay out six thousand and not get hurt?  If you can’t see that you are no better business man than was Horace Greeley a farmer.  He purchased a pig for one dollar, kept it two years, fed it forty dollars worth of corn and sold it for nine dollars.  He said:  “I lost money on the corn but made money on the hog.”  So, many business men see the revenue from the license fee but can’t see the cost.

Suppose on one side of a street the business houses are all bad, in that they consume money and give worse than nothing in return; and on the other side they are all good, in that they give an honest equivalent for the money they receive; can’t you see if the bad side is closed, the money that went to the bad side goes to the good, and can you not see only good can come of such a change?

There are three things prohibition of the saloon does that are illustrated by the story told of an Irishman who said:  “I did three good things today.”

“What did you do, Pat?”

“I saw a woman crying in front of a cathedral.  She had a baby in her arms, and I said:  ‘Madam, what are you crying about?’

“She said:  ’I had two dollars in me handkerchief and came to have me baby christened but I lost the money.’

“I said:  ’Don’t cry, Madam, here is a ten dollar bill; go get the baby christened and bring me the change.’  She went, and soon after returned and handed me eight silver dollars.”