MR. CHAIRMAN, AND LADIES AND GENTLEMEN: The campaign in Kansas this year is what is called an “off-year” contest. The intense enthusiasm, the fierce excitement, the great processions, with flags and banners and music and resounding hurrahs; the marvelous interest, dwarfing and absorbing all other concerns, and even paralyzing for months the every-day business pursuits and industries of the people—all these will be wanting in the campaign of 1886. And yet the interests involved in the election that will be held in November next are as momentous, and the issues depending on its result are quite as important to the State, as were the interests and issues depending upon the result at the ballot-box in 1884. The one officer who was to be elected then, and is not to be chosen now, was the President. We are to choose, in November next, as we did two years ago, a full board of State officers, seven Congressmen, a State Legislature, a Judge of the Supreme Court, and nearly half of our county officers. We are to elect men who will make our laws, National and State, as well as men who will execute our State laws. And as good local government really concerns each individual citizen far more than do the acts of the President, because it touches each and every citizen more directly, it has always seemed to me that the people, if they have a proper regard for their own interests, ought to regard the “off-year” elections with quite as deep interest, if not more anxious solicitude, than they do the choice of a President. DEMOCRACY IN KANSAS. I appear before you as the candidate of a great party, honored by its confidence and proud to bear its standard, to ask you in its name for your support. I have been a citizen of this State for nearly thirty years. I came here, a boy of 18, when Kansas was a poor, weak, distracted Territory, rent and torn by civil war, invaded by hordes of ruffians and marauders, and suffering under all the evils of the worst government that ever harassed and oppressed a free people. For more than two years this intolerable lawlessness had prevailed—for nearly three years longer it continued; and the party that confronts us to-day, and is asking your support, is the same party that, from 1854 to 1861, held Kansas by the throat, and by fraud, and murder, and arson, and turbulence, and every crime that ever disgraced humanity, endeavored to fasten upon it the curse of Human Slavery.