I am a Republican because I am a KANSAN. I came to this State when it was a Territory governed by the Democratic party. I learned something of Democratic methods, policies and principles during those years. I saw a free people denied their dearest political rights. I saw all the power and authority of the National Administration exerted to fasten slavery upon this State, against the will of a large majority of its citizens. I know the history of that period by heart, and there is no record so stained with usurpations, so crowded with wrong, injustice and tyranny, so sullied with crime, as is the record of the years from 1855 to 1861, when the Democratic party controlled the affairs of Kansas. Contrast that period with the Republican administration of the past twenty-three years, and the development, the enterprise, the prosperity, the world-wide fame, that have gone hand in hand with it. I have seen Kansas grow from a half-tilled, forlorn strip along the west bank of the Missouri, into a splendid, imperial State, with nearly a million and a quarter of inhabitants—a State with nearly eighteen million acres occupied as farms, with over four thousand miles of railway, seven thousand school-houses and a thousand churches, and with property aggregating in value nearly five hundred million dollars. All this growth, all this enterprise, all this marvelous prosperity, began with and has continued under Republican rule—clean, healthy, intelligent rule, worthily representing the brain and heart and energy of a Republican constituency.