THE CHILD OF A GREAT ERA.
It is not a long lapse of time since the 29th of January, 1861. A boy born during that eventful year cast his first Presidential vote at the last election. But no other period of the world’s history has been so fertile in invention, so potential in thought, so restless and aggressive in energy, or so crowded with sublime achievements, as the quarter-century succeeding the admission of Kansas as a State. During that period occurred the greatest war the world has ever known. An industrious, self-governed, peace-loving people, transfigured by the inspiration of patriotism and freedom, became, within a twelvemonth, a Nation of trained and disciplined warriors. Human slavery, entrenched for centuries in law, tradition, wealth, and the pride of race, was annihilated, and five million slaves were clothed with the powers and responsibilities of citizenship. The continent was girdled with railroad and telegraph lines. In 1860 there were only 31,186 miles of railway in the United States; there are now fully 130,000 miles. Less than 50,000 miles of telegraph wires were stretched at the date of the admission of Kansas; there are now nearly 300,000 miles. The telephone and the electric light are fruits of this period, and the improvements and inventions in farm implements, in books and newspapers, in all the appliances of mechanical industry, and in the arts and sciences, have revolutionized nearly every department of human activity.
When this marvelous era dawned upon the world, Kansas was a fiction of the geographers. On the map of our country it was marked as a desert, and the few explorers who had penetrated its vast solitudes described it as an arid and sandy waste, fit only for the wild bison or the wilder Indian. There it had lain for centuries, voiceless and changeless, waiting for the miracle of civilization to touch and transform it.
The passage of the Kansas-Nebraska bill made Kansas the central figure in a tremendous conflict. It became not only the child of a marvelous epoch, and heir to all the progress, the achievements and the glory of that epoch, but it stood for an idea; it represented a principle; and that idea and principle thrilled the heart and awakened the conscience of the Nation. That a State cradled amid such events, schooled during such a period, and inspired by such sentiments, should, in its growth and development, illustrate these mighty energies and impulses, was inevitable. The Kansas of to-day is only the logical sequence of the influences and agencies that have surrounded, shaped and directed every step and stage of the State’s material and administrative progress.