I make this statement with a full realization of its meaning. I know there are many, even of our own people, who believe that a very large section of the western third of our State can never be successfully tilled. But actual experiment is shattering this theory. The line marking the western boundary of agricultural productiveness is a myth. It goes westward with the settlements. The rain-belt travels with the plow. It has been located on half a dozen degrees of longitude. It was on the Blue river when I came to the State, nearly thirty years ago. The valleys of the Republican, the Arkansas and the Solomon were then regarded as rainless deserts. But the line moved westward, year by year, until it reached the hundredth meridian. Beyond this, by almost universal assent, it was declared that successful farming was not possible. Yet in the northern tier, three counties lying west of that line, and running through to Colorado, are teeming with a busy and aggressive population; and these people point to crops of wheat and corn equaling any ever grown elsewhere, as the most convincing answer that can be made to the assertion that western Kansas is sterile and rainless. On the far southwestern line the development and the harvests produced are equally astonishing and convincing. The same wide and beautiful valleys, the same rich uplands, the same deep and productive soil, the same luxuriant vegetation, are the characteristics of these far-western counties, as they are of the counties watered by the Delaware, the Kansas, and the Neosho; and the same blue sky and pure air bends over and envelops the whole of this great State of ours, from the Missouri to the Colorado line. With this fair land as his home, with this productive soil as his workshop, and with the rare and healthful atmosphere of Kansas to stimulate his energy, the farmer of this State ought to be contented and prosperous. Certainly, in no other State have the opportunities for securing pleasant homes and productive farms been so favorable and so numerous as here in Kansas. Certainly, in no other land has so much material wealth been dug out of the earth in so brief a time, as here in Kansas. Certainly, in no other country under the shining stars have so many poor and struggling men won modest fortunes by honest industry, as here in Kansas. And certainly, the future of Kansas promises a growth and development as rapid, and as substantial, as that of the past.