When I began the work as a “Good Templar” forty years ago, Kentucky was soaked in rum.  Bourbon county, where I was reared, had twenty-three distilleries, and a dead wall lifted itself against my hopes of ever seeing the sky clear of distillery smoke above old Bourbon county, a name on more barrels and bottles, on more bar-room windows, and on the memories of more drunkards in ruin than any other county in the world.  Yet I have lived to see the last distillery fire go out, and Bourbon county dry.  While I had faith in the ultimate triumph of the Cause I never dreamt it would come to Bourbon county in my lifetime.

When I began saloons were at almost every crossroads village, and the bottle on sideboards was the rule in thousands of leading homes.  Time and again my life was threatened.  On one occasion twelve armed men guarded me from a mob, and once my wife placed herself between my body and a desperate mountaineer.  Those were perilous times for an advocate of temperance in my native state.  Now out of one hundred and twenty counties, one hundred and seven are dry.  In Georgia the licensed saloon is gone; in North Carolina the saloon is gone; in West Virginia, Old Virginia, Mississippi and Tennessee the saloon is gone, while Oklahoma was born sober.

  “That which made Milwaukee famous
    Doesn’t foam in Tennessee;
  The Sunday lid in old Missouri
    Was Governor Folk’s decree. 
  Brewers, distillers and their cronies
    Well may sigh;
  The saloon is panic-stricken,
    And the South’s going dry.

  “Soon the hill-side by the rill-side
    Of Kentucky will be still;
  Men will take their toddies
    From the ripples of the rill;
  Boys will grow up sober,
    Mothers cease to cry;
  Glory hallelujah! 
    The South’s going dry.”

Already seventeen states are dry, and there are many arid spots in the wet states.  While I cannot hope to live to see the final triumph, I have faith to believe my children and my children’s children will live in a saloonless land, a land redeemed from a curse that has soaked its social life in more blood and tears than all other sources of sorrow; a land where liberty will no longer be shorn of its locks of strength by licensed Delilahs; where manhood will no more be stripped of its possibilities by the claws of the demon drink; where fore-doomed generations will not reach the dawning of life’s morning, to be bound like Mazeppa to the wild, mad steed of passion and borne down the blood lines of inheritance to the awful abuse of drunkenness.

To this end I appeal to every minister of the gospel, stir the consciences of your hearers on this question.  I appeal to the press, that potent power for the enlightenment of the people.