I am appalled at the amount of drinking and gambling that has existed in Kansas, especially in the Missouri River towns, for the last three years, Under the shade of every green tree, on the streets, in every shop, store, grocery and hotel, it has seemed as if the chief business of the people was to gamble and drink.

There are other causes full of evil, and fearfully potent to work apostasy and ruin in the West.  Men come here, not to plead the cause of a suffering and dying Saviour; not to give to the people a more pure and self-denying morality, and a higher civilization; but to get rich.  They have had a dream, and are come to realize that dream.  They have dreamed of one thousand acres of land, bought at one dollar and a quarter per acre, that by the magic growth of some Western town becomes worth fifty thousand dollars.  They have dreamed of money invested in mythical towns, which towns are to rival in their growth Toledo, Chicago or St. Louis.  The dream is to do nothing and get rich.  Land sharks, speculators, usurers and politicians who aspire to a notoriety they will never win—­a station they will never occupy—­swarm over the West thicker than frogs in Egypt, and more intrusive than were these squatting, crawling, jumping pests, when evoked from the river’s slime by the rod of Moses.

Some men are too old when they come to the West.  They are like a vine whose tendrils are rudely torn from a branch around which they have wound themselves, and are so hardened by time that they can not entwine themselves around another support.  Such men forever worship, looking to the East.  They form no new friendships; engage in no new enterprises; they care for nobody, and nobody cares for them.  They live and die alone.

But there are more sad and gentle notes of sorrow that fall upon our ears.  The children mourn for the peach tree and the apple tree, with their luscious fruit.  The mother-wife asks who will watch the little grave, or tend the rose tree growing at its head, or who will train the woodbine, or care for the pinks and violets?  Then sadly she sings of home—­“Home, sweet home!” The father, too, remembers his pasture for his pigs, his calves, and sheep, and cows.  He remembers that on one poor forty acres of land he had a house, a barn, an orchard, woodland, maple trees for making maple sugar, a meadow, room for corn, wheat, oats and potatoes, besides pasture for one horse, two oxen, three cows, together with a number of sheep and pigs, Then there was the three months’ school in winter, and four months in summer.  There was the Sunday-school and the church, where serious and honest men uttered manly and religious counsel to sincere hearts, which nurtured good and holy purposes.  All this he has bartered away for the privilege of being rich—­of having more land than he knows what to do with; more corn than he can tend, and pigs till they are a pest to him.