THE COMMITTEES.
The Chairmanships of the different Committees were assigned as follows: Preamble and Bill of Rights—Wm. Hutchinson, of Lawrence; Executive Department—John P. Greer, of Shawnee; Legislative Department—Solon O. Thacher, of Lawrence; Judicial Department—Samuel A. Kingman, of Brown county; Military—James G. Blunt, of Anderson county; Electors and Elections—P. H. Townsend, of Douglas; Schedule—John T. Burris, of Johnson; Apportionment—H. D. Preston, of Shawnee; Corporations and Banking—Robert Graham, of Atchison; Education and Public Institutions—W. R. Griffith, of Bourbon county; County and Township Organizations—John Ritchie, of Topeka; Ordinance and Public Debt—James Blood, of Lawrence; Finance and Taxation—Benj. F. Simpson, of Lykins; Amendments and Miscellaneous—S. D. Houston, of Riley county; Federal Relations—T. S. Wright, of Nemaha county; Phraseology and Arrangement—John J. Ingalls, of Atchison.
I have studied the composition of these Committees with some interest, reviewing the work of their members in the Convention, and recalling their subsequent careers. And it appears to me that in making them up, President Winchell exhibited phenomenally quick and accurate judgment of men. He was, indeed, one of the best presiding officers I have ever known. His imperturbable coolness, never for an instant ruffled by the most sudden and passionate outbreaks of excitement in the Convention; his mastery of all the niceties of parliamentary law; his uniform courtesy and tact; his promptness and clearness in stating his decisions; and above all, the mingled grace and kindness and firmness with which he announced to an indignant member an adverse decision, were really wonderful. But what shall be said of that still more wonderful prescience with which he made up the Committees? What induced this calm, gray-eyed, observing little man, whose brass-buttoned blue coat was first seen by two-thirds of the Convention on the morning of the 5th of July—what impelled him, within twenty-four hours, to select an obscure, dull-looking, shock-headed country doctor as Chairman of the Military Committee, and thus name in connection with military affairs, for the first time, the only Kansas soldier who reached a full Major-Generalship? How did he happen to pass by half a dozen more wide-known lawyers, and appoint as Chairman of the Judiciary Committee a man who, during more than fifteen years thereafter, occupied a place on the Supreme Bench of the State, for the greater portion of this time as the Chief Justice? How came he to recognize so quickly, in the Engrossing Clerk of the Territorial Legislature, the ripest scholar and the fittest man in the body for the Chairmanship of the Committee to which every article of the Constitution was referred for final revision and amendment? In the youngest and most boyish-looking member he found the man who was to form, for this State, a code of Finance and Taxation whose clear directions and wholesome restrictions have guarded Kansas against the wasteful extravagance of Legislatures and the curse of a burdensome public debt, during all the tempting and perilous affairs of its first quarter of a century. And he named as head of the Committee on Education, the first State Superintendent of Public Instruction. All of his appointments were made with rare judgment, but those mentioned appear notably discerning.