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.