THE DEVELOPMENT OF KANSAS.
Address delivered at the Quarter-Centennial Celebration of the Admission of Kansas, Topeka, January 29, 1886.
Mr. Chairman, and Ladies and Gentlemen: In Grecian mythology it is related that Zeus, warned by an oracle that the son of his spouse, Metis, would snatch supremacy from him, swallowed both Metis and her unborn child. When the time of birth arrived, Zeus felt a violent pain in his head, and in his agony requested Hephæstus to cleave the head open with an ax. His request was complied with, and from the brain of the great god sprang Athena, full-armed and with a mighty war-shout. She at once assumed a high place among the divinities of Olympus. She first took part in the discussions of the gods as an opponent of the savage Ares. She gave counsel to her father against the giants; and she slew Enceladus, the most powerful of those who conspired against Zeus, and buried him under Mt. Ætna. She became the patron of heroism among men, and her active and original genius inspired their employment. The agriculturist and the mechanic were under her special protection, and the philosopher, the poet and the orator delighted in her favor. The ægis was in her helmet, and she represented the ether—pure air. She was worshipped at Athens because she caused the olive to grow on the bare rock of the Acropolis. She was also the protectress of the arts of peace among women. She bore in her hand the spool, the spindle and the needle, and she invented and excelled in all the work of women. She was the goddess of wisdom and the symbol of thought; she represented military skill and civic prudence. In war she was heroic and invincible; in peace she was wise, strong, inventive, and industrious.
THE ATHENA OF AMERICAN STATES.
Kansas is the Athena of American States. Thirty-six years ago the Slave Oligarchy ruled this country. Fearing that the birth of new States in the West would rob it of supremacy, the Slave Power swallowed the Missouri Compromise, which had dedicated the Northwest to Freedom. The industrious North, aroused and indignant, struck quick and hard, and Kansas, full-armed, shouting the war-cry of Liberty, and nerved with invincible courage, sprang into the Union. She at once assumed a high place among the States. She was the deadly enemy of Slavery; she gave voice and potency to the demand for its abolition; and she aided in burying Secession in its unhonored grave. The war over, she became the patron, as she had been during its continuance the exemplar, of heroism, and a hundred thousand soldiers of the Union found homes within the shelter of her embracing arms. The agriculturist and the mechanic were charmed by her ample resources and inspired by her eager enterprise. Education found in her a generous patron, and to literature, art and science she has been a steadfast friend. Her pure atmosphere invigorated all. A desert disfigured the map of the Continent, and she covered it with fields of golden wheat and tasseling corn. She has extended to women the protection of generous laws and of enlarged opportunities for usefulness. In war she was valiant and indomitable, and in peace she has been intelligent, energetic, progressive and enterprising. The modern Athena, type of the great Greek goddess, is our Kansas.
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.