"Umph!" rumbled the volcano as it shook hands with my companion and me. "You're from New York? New York is running the big gambling house and show house for the country. It doesn't produce anything. It doesn't take any more interest in where the money comes from than a gambler cares where you get the money you put into his game.
"Kansas is the greatest state in the Union. It thinks. It produces things. Among other things, it produces crazy people. It is a great thing to have a few crazy people around! Roosevelt is crazy. Umph! So were the men who started the Revolution to break away from England.
"Most of the people in the United States don't think. They are indifferent and apathetic. They don't want to work. One of our 'Star' boys went to an agricultural college to see what was going on there. What did he find out? Why, that instead of making farmers they were making professors. Yes. Pretty nearly the entire graduating class went there to learn to teach farming. That's not what we want. We want farmers."
The Colonel's enemies have tried, on various occasions, to "get" him, but without distinguished success. The Colonel goes into a fight with joy. Once, when he was on the stand as a witness in a libel suit which had been brought against his paper, a copy of the editorial containing the alleged libel was handed to him by the attorney for the prosecution.
"Colonel Nelson," said the attorney, menacingly, "did you write this?"
"No, sir!" bristled the Colonel with apparent regret at the forced negation of his answer, "but I subscribe to every word of it!"
Once the Colonel's enemies almost succeeded in putting him in jail.
A "Star" reporter wrote a story illustrating the practice of the Jackson County Circuit Court in refusing to permit a divorce case to be dismissed by either husband or wife until the lawyers in the case had received their fees. The "Star" contended that such practice, where the couple had made up their quarrel, made the court, in effect, a collection agency. Through a technical error the story, as printed, seemed to refer to the judge of one division of the court when it should have applied to another. The judge who was, through this error, apparently referred to, seized the opportunity to issue a summons charging Colonel Nelson with contempt of court.