Kansas was embraced in the grant of land made by King James I, of England, in the Virginia charter of 1609. Pennsylvania was embraced in the grant of land made by Charles II, of England, to William Penn, in 1681. But the French discovered the Mississippi in 1682, and from that date until 1763, Kansas was a French possession. It then passed into the hands of Spain. In 1780 Benjamin Franklin, then in Paris, set on foot negotiations for the purchase of Louisiana, which included Kansas. In 1800 the first Napoleon wrested Louisiana from Spain, and on the 30th of April, 1803, sold it to the United States. Pennsylvania remained an English colony until it became an American State. A very old poetical legend explains how Pennsylvania came to be settled, in the statement that that— “Penn refused to pull his hat off Before the King, and therefore sat off Another country to light pat on.” Reduced to sober prose, this doggerel expresses an idea that first attracted public attention to Kansas, and for many years did much to promote settlement in this State, _i. e._, love of freedom—religious, political, and individual. This sentiment gave Kansas her first start in the world, and she has kept her pace and her place ever since. In 1800 our old native State had a population of only 602,361, and in twenty years this had increased to but little over a million. Kansas will far surpass that growth within twenty years from 1875, when she had a population of 531,156. We have over 700,000 now, and will have a round million in 1880. This is a fast age. Kansas was organized as a Territory less than a quarter of a century ago, and yet we have had nearly as many Governors as Pennsylvania, mossed as she is with the antiquity of over two centuries. As to State Constitutions, we can beat her, for Pennsylvania has managed to get along with three in a century, while Kansas had four before she got fairly into the Union, and I don’t know how many amendments since. Only one railroad crosses the good old Keystone State from East to West; Kansas has two passing from the Missouri to the Colorado line, and a third nearly half-way across. Atchison has more railroads than the great manufacturing city of Pittsburgh, and is as great a “Railroad Center” as Philadelphia. They make a man live there seven years before he can be Governor, yet they sent us three who were sworn in before they ever saw Kansas. Pennsylvania had nearly three million people in 1860, yet their Legislature is not as big, numerically, as is ours. Probably the average Kansan needs more laws to keep him within reasonable bounds than does the average Pennsylvanian.