I wish I could sketch more in detail the work and history of the members
of the Convention. But this paper is, I know, already too long. I have
tried to tell how our Constitution was made. I could not narrate, within
reasonable limits,
“What workman wrought its ribs of steel,
Who made each mast, and sail, and rope,
What anvils rang, what hammers beat,
In what a forge and what a heat
Were shaped the anchors of its hope.”
It is enough to say that the work has proved strong and enduring.
Through the groping inexperience of our State’s childhood and the still
more perilous ambitions of its youth, through the storm of civil war and
the calm of prosperous peace, the Wyandotte Constitution has justified
the confident hopes of its early friends. The most marvelous changes
have been wrought in this country since it was framed. The huge brick
building in which the Convention held its sessions, long ago crumbled
and fell. The distracted, dependent and turbulent Territory has grown to
be a peaceful, powerful and prosperous State. Its hundred thousand
people have multiplied to a million. Upon its vast and solitary
prairies, where then bloomed a wild and unprofitable vegetation,
“wherewith the mower filleth not his hand, nor he that bindeth sheaves
his bosom,” miles of green meadows now glisten with morning dew, and
thousands of golden wheat-fields shimmer in the noonday sun, and
millions of acres of tasseling corn, rustling in the sweet twilight air,
tell of harvests so bountiful that they would feed a continent. Every
quiet valley and prairie swell is dotted with pleasant homes, where
happy children laugh and play and men and women go their busy ways in
prosperous content. Eager learners throng eight thousand school houses.
Church bells ring in nearly every county from the Missouri to the
Colorado line. More than four thousand miles of railway bind town and
country, factory and farm and store, into one community. And over all
the institutions and activities of this great, intelligent and orderly
Commonwealth, broods the genius and spirit of the Wyandotte
Constitution. Under its ample authority and direction, just and generous
laws have maintained the rights of citizenship, given protection to
labor and property, stimulated enterprise, multiplied industries, opened
to every child and youth the door of school and college, encouraged
morality, fostered temperance, protected the weak, restrained the
strong, and sternly punished outbreaking crime. And still the sunshine
of popular confidence and favor falls upon the Constitution. It has
outlived half of its framers, and when, a quarter of a century hence,
the last surviving member of the Convention awaits the inevitable hour,
the Wyandotte Constitution may yet be the chart and compass ordering and
guiding the destinies of a State whose imperial manhood is foreshadowed
by its stalwart and stately youth.