p. 513 | Exit Whisky by Kansas Farmer

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Nov 16, 1882

Exit Whisky.

By Kansas Farmer

To SAY that the liquor law cannot be enforced is nonsense, as we have all along insisted. Topeka's open drunkard factories were held up as so many unanswerable arguments that twenty outlaws could rule a city of twenty-two thousand people with regal sway, and that perpetually. It required more than a year for the people here to learn that dramsellers are persistently bad men, and that they respect themselves as little as they do decent and respectable people. But when this lesson was learned, it had its perfect work. Meetings were held, committees appointed, money deposited, suits begun, costs piled up—and then the mayor joins in, the city council follows, a proclamation ordering the saloons closed is published, and an ordinance providing ways and means to enforce the proclamation is passed; and lo! two days before the time named in the proclamation, the dram-shops are all closed, and the imperial body of rumsellers in organized body beg the county attorney to dismiss the prosecutions pending against them, and they offer to pay all costs now due, amounting to some twenty-five hundred dollars.

To-day there is not a whisky shop in Topeka. The room directly opposite the window where this is written, a place that has been like a beehive, with swarms of people going in and out all hours of the day and most of the night, is deserted—not a man or a boy to be seen swaggering about its large glass doors with the big screen beyond. It is a decent looking place now. Exit whisky.—Kansas Farmer.