schools.

So that today when the man in the street thinks of Kansas he winks at himself in the mirror and grins. Kansas! What a joke!

Meanwhile if the man on the street, particularly if he lives east of Chicagocould take even a hurried trip through Kansas, he would certainly realize that the joke is on him. He would be impressed, first of all, by the exceeding richness and prosperity of the state.

After running for miles through alfalfa and corn fields, as thick and lustrous as green velvet, he comes suddenly into a trim and handsome city, with great maple and elm trees arching over wide, clean streets. He will see, with something like a gasp of surprise, that the rolling prairies are broken by high hills and clumps of big trees, and cut by rivers and winding creeks.

Getting off the train at some small Kansas town, with visions of cyclone cellars and sod houses in his eye, he will be met by a smart page in buttons who carries his suit case across the street to a handsome hotel in the English timbered style, where the service and table is within five points of perfection. Then, when he orders his cocktail before dinner he will be told that Kansas is a prohibition state. And presently one of the

BOY LOST IN A KANSAS CORNFIELD.

the page regrets that a cocktail is impossible. possible. His statement is endorsed by the manager of the hotel. The prohibition law is really enforced in Kansas. So are the other laws. No wonder the State has a reputation for crankiness!

Irrespective of the views of the visitor on the subject of personal liberty and

prohibition, he can not but be impressed by the fact that the wonderful progress and prosperity of Kansas has been achieved under the operation of the prohibition law. In the last ten years the bank deposits of the state have jumped from $70,000,000 to $190,000,000 and since. the law has been effectively and completely enforced, the growth of business has been even more rapid. Fifty-seven out of the one hundred and five counties of Kansas are without a pauper, eighty-seven have no in

Presently it may begin to dawn on the reluctant Eastern visitor that the chief reason why Kansas is considered so queer and cranky is the mental alertness of its people. A new idea is the most alarming thing in the world to the average man. And when a state produces an annual crop of new ideas and pu's most of them into practical service, it is no wonder that smug and conservative self-complacency is shocked into a fit. Kansas people, while properly proud of themselves and their achievements, have never been self-satisfied. They have always been trying to im

sane person and the death rate of the state is the lowest in the world-seven and one-half per thousand. Woe betide the advocate of an occasional cocktail if

prove. The New York man who feels that any attempt to improve on Broadway would be sacrilegious, naturally cannot appreciate "the state of mind" which is Kansas.

What other people, for instance, ever produced a state official who declined an appointment as United States senator because he preferred to stay at home and write poems on pork, odes on oats, and sonnets on alfalfa for circulation among a lot of farmers? F. D. Coburn is the Kansas Horace and the bulletins which are issued by the Kansas State Board of Agriculture under his direction, are so different from any other similar documents as to raise all

COUNTY FAIR.

KANSAS CORN.

This twenty ears of corn weighed twenty-seven pounds, four ounces,

sorts of suspicions in the

common

place mind of an ordinary dry-as-dust, Kagricultural expert. Coburn's produc

tions are bound and printed in the style of art booklets and bear such alluring titles as "Alfalfa's Affinity." "The Hog's Happy Habitat," and "The Lay of the Helpful Hen," also the convincing facts and figures which Coburn knows so well how to present, are spiced with bits of verse-all, like the hogs and poultry, native products of the Kansas soil. First is printed a table, showing that according to the nationa! government an average Kansas hog is worth more actual cash than a porker from any other state in the union. Then, just below the figures, Walt Mason, the Emporia bard, bursts into song:

"Kansas: Where we've torn the shackles
From the farmer's leg;

Kansas: Where the hen that cackles
Always lays an egg;

Where the cows are fairly achin'

To go on with record breakin';
And the hogs are raising bacon
By the keg."

The significance of all this lies not in the fact that Mr. Coburn happens to be a man of literary tastes, with a graceful method of expressing himself, but in the really remarkable appreciation with which his outpourings are received by the mass of Kansas farmers. Nothing could be more eloquent of mental alertness and a high quality of general intelligence.

The reports of the Kansas State Board of Health may also be fairly classed as literary productions. Its inspectors and experts travel continually about the state, analyzing the water supply, printing boldly the constituents of patent medicines, making public the names and addresses of firms who violate the pure food law, keeping close track of contagious and infectious diseases and in every way helping the people to make what is already the lowest death rate in the world still lower. The results of

their labor are printed monthly in a bulletin which is sent free to any citizen who cares to ask for it. And sprinkled about among the statistics and tables are quotations from Emerson and Carlyle, essays on Abraham Lincoln, and fugitive poems, selected with fine taste and discrimination.

Another thing which leads Eastern people to the conviction that Kansas people are cranks is the remarkable if misguided, unanimity with which Kansans continue to remain residents of their native state. To the typical New York man whose sole idea of heaven is the Great White Way, the fact that anyone should voluntarily and by preference live anywhere but on Manhattan Island is primâ facie and complete evidence of insanity. How men like William Allen White and Ed Howe, who could get good jobs on New York magazines, who have written famous novels, dined with

presidents, and who really seem to have a certain degree of culture and refinement, can willingly stay in Kansas, is beyond all understanding! They are cranks-that's the only way to explain it from the Eastern standpoint.

Meanwhile, Kansas and its farmers keep on moving, growing bigger and richer and more intelligent. When a new idea comes along that seems to promise improvement in living conditions, the Kansas people meet it at the front gate and invite it in to take off its coat and have a, bite to eat. They are all alive out in Kansas. Sockless Simpson, Carrie Nation and "Whiskers" Pfeffer were all Kansas products and the state is not ashamed of them. Each in his way served at least to focus public attention

on some evil that might otherwise have remained unnoticed.

A state that leads the country in the production of wheat, with a corn crop vastly greater in value than the wheat; a state with the lowest death rate and the highest standard of intelligence; a state where people are more interested in changing their minds than in changing their clothes! Above the mellow hum which comes from behind the screen of sunflowers-it is the hum of Kansas poets, not grasshoppers---rises one clear voice:

Life's burdens bear the lightest,
Home fires burn the brightest;
Her friendships are the strongest;
And love's light glows the longest;
Out in Kansas.