It is enough to say that the work has proved strong and enduring. Through the groping inexperience of our State's childhood and the still more perilous ambitions of its youth, through the storm of civil war and the calm of prosperous peace, the Wyandotte Convention has justified the confident hopes of its early friends. The most marvelous changes have been wrought in this country since it was framed. The huge brick building in which the Convention held its sessions, long ago crumbled and fell. The distracted, dependent and turbulent Territory has grown to be a peaceful, powerful and prosperous State. Its hundred thousand people have multiplied to a million. Upon its vast and solitary prairies, where then bloomed a wild and unprofitable vegetation, "wherewith the mower filleth not his hand, nor he that bindeth sheaves his bosom," miles of green meadows now glisten with morning dew, and thousands of golden wheat fields shimmer in the noonday sun, and millions of acres of tasseling corn, rustling in the sweet twilight air, tell of harvests so bountiful that they would feed a continent. Every quiet valley and prairie swell is dotted with pleasant homes, where happy children laugh and play and men and women go their busy ways in prosperous content. Eager learners throng eight thousand school houses. Church bells ring in nearly every county from the Missouri to the Colorado line. More than four thousand miles of railway bind town and country, factory and farm and store, into one community. And over all the institutions and activities of this great, intelligent and orderly Commonwealth, broods the genius and spirit of the Wyandotte Convention. Under its ample authority and direction, just and generous laws have maintained the rights of citizenship, given protection to labor and property, stimulated enterprise, multiplied industries, opened to every child and youth the door of school and college, encouraged morality, fostered temperance, protected the weak, restrained the strong, and sternly punished outbreaking crime. And still the sunshine of popular confidence and favor falls upon the Constitution. It has outlived half of its framers, and when, a quarter of a century hence, the last surviving member of the Convention awaits the inevitable hour, the Wyandotte Constitution may yet be the chart and compass ordering and guiding the destinies of a State whose imperial manhood is foreshadowed by its stalwart and stately youth. [Illustration] TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES 1. Changed 1855 to 1854 on p. 4. 2. Silently corrected simple spelling, grammar, and typographical errors. 3. Retained anachronistic and non-standard spellings as printed. 4. Enclosed italics font in _underscores_. End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Wyandotte convention; an address, by John Alexander Martin