Gov.  Geary at once summoned the officers together, and addressed them at length and with great feeling.  He depicted in a forcible manner the improper position they occupied and the untold horrors that would result from a consummation of their cruel designs; that if they persisted in their mad career the entire Union would be involved in a civil war, and thousands and tens of thousands of innocent lives be sacrificed.  To Atchison he particularly addressed himself, telling him that when he last saw him he was acting as Vice-President of the nation and President of the most dignified body of men in the world, the Senate of the United States, but now with sorrow and pain he saw him leading on to a civil and disastrous war an army of men with uncontrollable passions, and determined upon wholesale slaughter and destruction.  He concluded his remarks by directing attention to his proclamation, and ordered the army to be disbanded and dispersed.  Some of the more judicious of the officers were not only willing but anxious to obey this order, while others, resolved upon mischief, yielded a reluctant assent.

CHAPTER XXI.

It is now one-third of a century since Kansas began to be settled.  Great as has been the progress of the States of this Union within this period, the progress of Kansas has been exceptionally and peculiarly so.  Its chief glory is not in its large agricultural and mineral resources; it is not in its railroads and lines of telegraph; it is not in the rapidly increasing population of educated men and women, but it is in this, that it was not only the first State in the nation, but the first Commonwealth in the world, to solve the problem of the drink evil, the giant curse of Christendom, by incorporating prohibition into its fundamental law.

In union there is strength.  Jesus said so.  He said, “Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation.”  And so evidently does this principle commend itself to the common sense of men, that we have engraved on our national ensign the motto, “E Pluribus Unum” —­one out of many.

How did such growth in Kansas come to be?  Not in division, but in union.  We have thought it would do us good to look squarely in the face that hard, cruel, and bloody period when it seemed the business of the people to cut each other’s throats.  But cutting each other’s throats does not create such growth as we have had in Kansas.

Two peoples came together in Kansas, one from the South and one from the North.  They were of one original stock, but circumstances had intervened and made them two peoples.  For two years this bloody strife had been going on.  It is said that in revolutions men live fast.  It was two years, if we count the time by the revolutions of the earth around the sun, but if we count by the experience men had gained, it was many years.