A new Kansas has been developed during that period. The youth of 1875 has grown to the full stature and strength of confident and intelligent manhood. The people have forgotten to talk of drouths, which are no more incident to Kansas than to Ohio or Illinois. They no longer watch the clouds when rain has not fallen for two weeks. The newspapers no longer chronicle rains as if they were uncommon visitations. A great many things, besides the saloons, have gone, and gone to stay. The bone-hunter and the buffalo-hunter of the plains, the Indian and his reservations, the jayhawker and the Wild Bills, the Texas steer and the cowboy, the buffalo grass and the dug-outs, the loneliness and immensity of the unpeopled prairies, the infinite stretching of the plains, unbroken by tree or shrub, by fence or house—all these have vanished, or are rapidly vanishing. In their stead has come, and come to stay, an aggressive, energetic, cultured, sober, law-respecting civilization. Labor-saving machines sweep majestically through fields of golden wheat or sprouting corn; blooded stock lazily feed in meadows of blue-stem, timothy, or clover; comfortable houses dot every hill-top and valley; forests, orchards and hedge-rows diversify the loveliness of the landscape; and where isolation and wildness brooded, the majestic lyric of prosperous industry is echoing over eighty-one thousand square miles of the loveliest and most fertile country that the sun, in his daily journey, lights and warms. The voiceless Sphynx of thirty years ago has become the whispering-gallery of the continent. The oppressed Territory of 1855, the beggared State of 1874, has become a Prince, ruling the markets of the world with opulent harvests. THE FACTS OF THE CENSUS. I am not, in thus exalting the growth and prosperity of Kansas, speaking recklessly, as I shall show by statistics compiled from the census and agricultural reports of the United States and our own State. Figures are always dry, I know. But when they tell the pleasant story of the march of civilization into and over a new land, surely they cannot fail to interest men and women who have themselves marched with this conquering army of industry and peace. THE GROWTH OF KANSAS WITHOUT PARALLEL.