They played with his virtuous foibles and fired his imagination. He gave himself, his time, his men, his horses, his implements for construction; his lands for right of way. He hewed his black walnuts and elms into sleepers, and sawed his bulky oaks for bridges. He called special elections and voted aid in bonds. He gave perpetual exemption from taxes. Rugged enthusiast that he was he gave whatever he had to give,--but first he gave faith and altruistic looking-out for the interests of the other man. Great popular works still abiding--cathedrals in Europe are perhaps the most noted--were put up by like kindling of the human spirit. His road was made ready for sleepers, and funds for purchasing iron he formally handed the promoters,--since which day purslane and smartweed and golden sunflowers have cloaked the serpentine grades which his own hands had advanced at the rate of more than a mile between each dawn and sunset. One direct relation and force of these inflated plans to the Kansan have been that they often swerved and controlled the values of his land, and the prices of those commodities from which a soil-worker supports a family hungry, growing, and in need of his commonwealth’s great schools. And the man himself, poor futurist and striver after the idea, with a soul soaring heavenward and hands stained and torn with weed-pulling and corn-husking!--his ready faith, his tendency to seek a hero, his brushing aside of conservative intuition, his meliorism, his optimism, his receptivity to ideas, his dear humanness--in other words, his charm, his grace, his individuality, his Americanism--wrought him harm. Our corporate man, loving, aspiring, working, waiting, started out with a nervous excitability already given. He was a man with a bee in his bonnet. He was seeking ideal conditions. Originally he was a reactionist against feudal bondage, the old bondage of human to human and of human to land. Later his soul took fire at the new bondage of human to wage and job. He would have every man and woman about him as free in person as he was in idea. What wonder then that he or his descendent spirit in the midst of agricultural distress enacted a mortgage equity or stay law, and determined that that law should apply to mortgages in existence at the passage of the act! He it is of the all-embracing Populism, the out-reaching Prohibitionism, the husband-man-defensive Grangerism. Shall we not humanly expect him, and those suffering the contagion of his noble singleness, to clutch at plans for a social millennium? “Heaven is as easily reached from Kansas,” wrote an immigrant of 1855, “as from any other point.”