The daily morning journal and courier., 1896-10-12
What Is the matter with Kansas?

| the cities of the DakotaS, St. Paul and Minneapolis--all cities and towns in the west have steadily grown.
 Take up the government blue book and you will see that Kansas is virtu- ally off the map. Two or three little scabby consular places In yellow fever l stricken communities that do not az gregate ten thousand dollars a year is all the recognition Kansas has, Ne braska draws about one hundred thou sand dollars; little old North Dakota draws fifty thousand dollars; Oklaho- ma doubles Kansas; Missouri leaves her thousand miles behind; Colorado Is almost seven times greater than Kansas-the whole west is ahead of Kansas.
 l Take it by any standard you please, | Kansas is not in 1t.
 Go east, and you hear them laugh at Kansas, go west and they sheer at her, go south and they "cuss" her, go north and they have forgotten her. Go into any crowd of intelligent people gath cred anywhere on the globe and you will find the Kansas man on the defen sive. The newspaper columns and magazine pages, once devoted to praise of the state to boastful facts and startling figures concerning her re- sources, now are filled with cartoons, gibes and Pefferian speeches. Kansas just naturally isn't in the civilized world She has traded places with Ar kansas and Timbuctoo.
 Whats the matter with Kansas?
 We all know; yet here we are at it | again. We have an old moss back Jacksonian, who shorts and howls be- cause there is bath tub in the state house; we are running that old jay for i governor. We have another shabby wild eyed rattle -brained fanatic who | has said openly in dozen speeches that "the rights of the user are para mount to the rights of the owner;" we are running him for chief justice, so that capital will come tumbling over it. self to get into the state. We have l raked the ash heap of human failure in the State and have found an old hoop skirt of a man who has failed as a bus- | mess man, who has failed as an editor, who has failed as a preacher, and we are going to run him for congressman at-large. 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 l vote for him as attorney general. l Then for fear some hint that the state | had become respectable might perco- l late through the civilized portions of l the nation, we have decided to send three or four harpies out featuring, tell | ing the people that Kansas is raising | he'll and letting corn go to weeds. l Oh, this is state to be proud of! l We are a people who can hold up our heads What we need here Is less mon- I ey, less capital, fewer white shirts and brains. fewer men with business judg- ment, and more of these fellows who boast that they are just ordinary old clodhoppers, but that they know more in minute about finance than John Sherman" We need more men who are posted" who can below about the crime of '73 who hate poste~ity, and who think that because a man believes in national honor that he is tool of Wall street We have had a few of | them. some one hundred and fifty thou sand, but we want more. We need several thousand gibbering idiots to scream about the Great Red Dragon of Lombard street. We don't need population, we don't need wealth, we l don't need well-dressed men on the l 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. l Because we have become poorer and | ornier and eaner- 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
 sThere are two ideas of government 7 said our noble Bryan at Chicago. "There are those who believe that if you just legislate to make the well-to- do prosperous their prosperity will leak through on those below. The demo- cratic idea has been that if you legis- | late to make the masses prosperous their prosperity will find It's way up and through every class and rest upon us.''
 That's the stuff Give the prosperous l man the dickens Legislate the thrift less into ease; whack the stuffing out of the creditors, and tell the debtor who borrowed money five years ago, when the money in circulation was more gen. eral than it is now, that the contrac- I tion of the currency gives him a right to repudiate
 Whoop it up for the ragged trousers; put the lazy, greasy iizzle, who can pay his debts on an altar and bow down and worship him. Let the state ideal be high What we need Is not the re- spect of our fellow men, but a. chance tn eyet something for nothing
 Oh, yes, Kansas is great state. Here are people fleeing from it by the score every day, capital going out of the state by the hundreds of dollars, and every industry except farming par alyzed, and that crippled because it's products have to go across the ocean before they can find a laboring man at work who can afford to buy them. Let's don't stop this year. Let's drive all the decent, self-respecting men out of the state Let's keep the old clod- hoppers who know it all. Let's en- courage the man who is posted" He can talk and what we need is not mill hands to eat our meat, nor factory hands to eat our wheat, nor cities to oppress the farmer by consuming his | butter and eggs and chickens and pro- duce; what Kansas needs is men who can talk, who have large leisure to argue the currency question while their wives wait at home for that Tickers worth of bluing.
 ] A. S+ax !,