Kansas City daily journal., 1897-01-17
The Turmoil Kansas.

From the New York Sun.
The thirty-sixth anniversary of the ad-
mission of Kansas into the Union is to be
celebrated on January %, and a formal
response is to be made by speakers of state
reputation to what are called the unjust
censures of Eastern enemies" This re-
sponse is to be coupled with some legis-
lation of reprisal against Eastern capital
lists. the particular object not being, as
heretofore. the railroad corporations, but
the insurance companies. The agitation
has already begun, with the passage of a
law requiring life and fire insurance COM
panies to invest 65 per cent of their pre-
miums collected in the state in Kansas Sc
curities and deposit them with the state
treasurer. The present Kansas legislature
consists of seventy-four Populists and sill
verite Republicans eleven Democrats and
fifty Republicans, u safe Populist ma
jority in both branches. so far as Pop
ulist majority in an American legislature
can ever be said to be safe which usual
ly it is not. The question has often been
asked why it is that radical policies, pc
culiar notions of government, Impractical
BILE plans in legislation and politics. and
unreasonable and undesirable popular an
tipathies are permitted to govern the
course of things in Kansas. n state differ
ent in these respects from those which sur
round it.
THE toll and trouble feature of political
life in Kansas is clearly traceable to the
conflicts on the slavery question which
earned for that commonwealth the title of
bleeding Kansas long before the beginning
of the civil war and while the general sub
ject of slavery. its extension or abolition,
vas being waGed on Kansas soil. To Kan
sas from Missouri and Kentucky, but more
AZ; Al
and restless Southern agitators who IA
yored the extension of slavery betook
themselves when the question of it's adop-
ton in Kansas was still uncertain through
the meetings of successive conventions to
agree upon the form of 4 constitution.
From September, 1865, to January 1861. n
period of six years, the battle between the
friends of freedom and the defenders of
slavery went on uninterruptedly. To Kan
sas John Brown, who had been preceded
by four of his sons, started in 1852, and
thither went scores of abolitionistS from
the Eastern states, commingled, as their
Southern opponents were, with many ad-
venturous spirits and many fortune hunt
ers. Kansas then became, and it has con-
tinued ever since to be- a hotbed of polit-
ical agitation, this condition being much
aggravated by the fact that the state is
almost exclusively devoted to agriculture.
and is limited to the product of few sta
pies. The climate is uniformly uncertain,
and by the last federal census there was
only one city in the whole of Kansas hav-
ing a population as large as Long Island
City has to-day. Agitators of either party,
unable to secure a hearing elsewhere, find
great favor in Kansas. and the more un-
reasonable and impracticable their plans
are the more certain they seem to be of
popular acceptance. What prevents Kan
sas from being desirable state for the
investment of money is the discrimination
which the Topeka legislature, from time to
time, sets up against corporations. The
rate of interest is high in Kansas (higher
than in some neighboring states), and is
augmented to some extent, perhaps, by the
uncertainty of payment