THE GROWTH OF KANSAS WITHOUT PARALLEL.

The growth of Kansas has had no parallel. The great States of New York and Pennsylvania were nearly a hundred and fifty years in attaining a population Kansas has reached in thirty years. Kentucky was eighty years, Tennessee seventy-five, Alabama ninety, Ohio forty-five, and Massachusetts, New Jersey, Georgia, and North and South Carolina each over a hundred years, in reaching the present population of Kansas. Even the marvelous growth of the great States of the West has been surpassed by that of Kansas. Illinois was organized as a Territory in 1810, and thirty years later had only 691,392 inhabitants, or not much more than one-half the present population of this State. Indiana was organized in 1800, and sixty years later had a population of only 1,350,428. Iowa was organized as a Territory in 1838, and had, at that date, a population of nearly 40,000. In 1870 it had only 1,194,020 inhabitants. Missouri was organized in 1812, with a population of over 40,000, and fifty years later had only 1,182,012. Michigan and Wisconsin, after fifty years of growth, did not have as many people as Kansas has to-day; and Texas, admitted into the Union in 1845, with a population of 150,000, had, thirty-five years later, only 815,579 inhabitants.

In 1861 Kansas ranked in population as the thirty-third State of the Union; in 1870 it was the twenty-ninth; in 1880 the twentieth; and it is now the fifteenth. During the past quarter of a century Kansas has outstripped Oregon, Rhode Island, Delaware, Florida, Arkansas, Vermont, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Maine, Minnesota, Maryland, Mississippi, California, North and South Carolina, Alabama, Wisconsin, and New Jersey—all States before the 29th of January, 1861. Of the Northern States only eight, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, and Iowa, and of the Southern States only six, Georgia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri, Virginia, and Texas, now outrank Kansas in population. At the close of the present decade Kansas will, I am confident, rank as the eleventh State of the American Union, and will round out the Nineteenth Century as the sixth or seventh.

In the following table the population of Kansas, as shown by the first census of the Territory, taken in January, 1855, and the official enumerations made every five years thereafter, is shown. The figures also exhibit the proportion of white and colored, and of native and foreign-born inhabitants; the increase of population every five years, and the density of population per square mile of territory at the close of each period. The State census taken in 1865, however, did not show the proportion of native and foreign-born citizens:

Year.	Total population.	Increase.	Density of population.	White population.	Colored.	Native population.	Foreign-born.
1855	8,601
1860	107,206	98,605	1.3	106,390	816	94,512	12,694
1865	140,179	32,973	1.6	127,270	12,909
1870	364,399	224,220	4.4	346,377	18,022	316,007	48,392
1875	528,349	163,950	6.5	493,00	35,344	464,682	63,667
1880	996,096	467,747	12.2	952,105	43,941	886,010	110,086
1885 [^[1]]	1,268,562	272,466	15.4	1,220,355	48,207	1,135,887	132,675

[1]. Census of March, 1885.