FELLOW-CITIZENS: It affords me peculiar pleasure to be with you to-day, and to discharge the duty assigned me of formally opening this great fair and festival. Under any circumstances it would be a pleasure to fulfill such an appointment, but, upon this occasion, it is doubly delightful. I wanted to come here, first, because I wished to see the material evidences of the marvelous growth and development of Southwestern Kansas; and, second, because I wanted to take off my hat, in the presence of the men and women who have wrought these miracles, and thank them, personally and in the name of the State, for doing what the most sanguine and enthusiastic Kansan never dreamed, ten years ago, could be done. When I came to Kansas, now nearly thirty years ago, it was the universal belief of the people of the Territory that agricultural development was not possible west of the Blue and the Neosho. Ten or twelve years later, this line of possible productiveness was moved westward to the Republican and the Arkansas, and ten years ago it was advanced to the hundredth meridian. Beyond that, all said, crops could not be produced; the country was a good grazing region, but the idea of growing wheat, or corn, or any cereals, in the sterile and rainless counties of the western third of the State, was preposterous. Men were foolhardy, the prophets said, to attempt agricultural pursuits in the western third of the State. The soil was barren, the altitude too great, and the whole region was rainless. Disregarding all these assertions, you people of the West came here. The loneliness and immensity of the plains had no terrors for you. You invaded their solitudes. You pushed the frontier steadily westward. You plowed and planted, digged and sowed. You were determined to conquer the land, by irrigation if necessary; by faith, and work, and courage, in any event. The invisible sentinels of danger and privation waited and watched every step of your advance, and the vastness and loneliness of the far-reaching prairies, always more melancholy than the ever-changing and always-murmuring woods, only intensified their terrors. But you came to stay, and you conquered. You saw the wilderness vanish; you conquered your own doubts and fears, and inspired others with your hopefulness and courage; until at last every doubting Thomas was silenced, and the whole world realized the fact that here, on the western borders of Kansas, was as rich, as beautiful, and as productive a land as the sun, journeying from continent to continent, looks down upon and warms with his genial rays.