What's The Matter With Kansas?

Take it by any standard you please, Kansas is not in it. Go east, and you hear them laugh at Kansas go west and they sneer at her, go south and they " cuss " her, go north and they have forgotten her. Go into any crowd of intelligent people gathered anywhere on the globe and you will flnd the Kansas man on the defensive. The newspaper columns and magazine pages, once devoted to praise of the state, to boastful facts and startling figures concerning her resources, now are filled with cartoons, gibes and Pefferian speeches. Kansas just naturally isn't in the eivilized world. ïhe has traded places with Arkansaw and Timbuctoo. What's the matter with Kansas? We all know; yet here we are at it again. We have an old moss back "Jacksonian" who snorts and howls becausf; there is a bath tub in the state house; we are running that old jay for governor. We have another shabby, wild eyed rattlebrained fanatic who said openly in a dozen speeches that '■the rights of the user are paramount to the rights of the owner;" we are running him for chief justice. so that capital will come tumbling over itself to get into the state. We have raked the ash heap of human failure in the state, and have found an old hoopskirt of a man who has failed as a business man, who has failed as an editor, who has failed as a preacher and we are going to run him for congressman atlarge. He will help the looks of the Kansas delegation in Washington Then we have discovered a kid without a law practice, and have decided to vote for him as attorney-general. Then for fear some hint that the state had beeome respeetable might percolate through the civilized portions of the nation, we have decided to send three or four harpies out lecturing, telling the people that - ansas is raising h - land letting corn go to weeds Oh, this is a state to be proud of. We are a people who can hold up our heads. What we need here is less money, less capital, fewer white shirts and brains, fewer men with business judgment,and more of these fellows who boast that they are "just ordinary clod hoppers.but they no more in a minute about finance than John Sherman." We need more men who are "posted," who can bellow about '-the crime of '73," who hate posterity, and who think that because a man believes in national honor that he is a tooi of VV all Street. We have had a few of them, some 150,000, but we want more We need several thousand jibbering idiots to scream about, the "Great Hed Dragon" of Lombard ttreet. We don't need population, we don't need wealth, we don't need well dressed men on the streets, we don't need standing in the nation, we don't need cities on these fertile prairies; you bet we don't. What we are after is the money power. Because we have become poorer and ornier and meaner than a spavined, distempered mule, we, the people of Kansas, propose to kick. We don't care to build up, we wish to tear down. What's the matter with Kansas? Nothing under the shining sun. She is losing wealth, population and standing She has got her statesmen and the money power is af raid of her. Kansas is all right. She has started in to raise h- 1, as Mrs. Lease advised, and she seems to have an overproduction. But that doesn't matter Kansas never did believe in diversifted crops. Kansas is all right. There is absolutely nothing wrong with Kansas. "Every prospect