bastard child of an exemption law." This was Kingman's great work in the convention that framed our constitution. He never dreamed of greatness as we conceive the term; he worked blindly and in the dark, as all men did in those early times when they planned for the future of a state that was planted on the rim of a desert, whose hopelessness far outweighed any promise of greatness. It would be enough of fame, as he conceived fame, if there were carved upon his monument the words

FATHER OF THE KANSAS HOMESTEAD LAW:

WYANDOTTE, July, 1859.”

Great as was Judge Kingman's work in this convention, a greater and much more difficult work was still before him. In 1861 he became associate justice. of the Supreme Court, and was twice thereafter elected chief justice. It was a most fortunate thing that Kansas had in its judiciary beginnings a man of Kingman's temperament on the supreme bench. He carried with him to the court probity, a high sense of honor, and a remarkably clear power of analysis. He brought to that work still other high qualities, among them a moral courage that was unassailable, and a trained and disciplined mind accustomed to weigh and fully consider complicated propositions. His opinions remain to us models of judicial literature. Among his early judicial work he established for all time the standard for judges to follow in jury trials. His opinions on constitutional questions are familiar to you all, and because of them he has many times been alluded to as the "John Marshall of Kansas." In all his works there is manifest the principle that was constantly in his mind-no man can be above the law, and no man beneath it.

An instance occurred in the case of Albert Wiley v. Keokuk [6 Kan. 94]. Wiley was agent for the Sac

and Fox Indians, and Keokuk was a chief. The acting commissioner of Indian affairs, Mr. Mix, had directed that no delegation of Indians should visit Washington because no appropriation had been made for that purpose. Keokuk had money of his own and started to Washington. Wiley followed him and had him arrested at Lawrence. Later Keokuk brought suit against him for assault and battery and false imprisonment, and recovered $1,000 as damages. Wiley brought the case to the Supreme Court, and the opinion was delivered by Chief Justice Kingman. Among other things he said:

"Nor does it make any difference that the party injured is an Indian, whether he be regarded as 'a ward of government,' or as belonging to a 'domestic dependent nation,' or 'a distinct independent political community, retaining their original natural rights'to each of which classes they have at times been assigned by the language of the Supreme Court of the United States. In any view, while keeping the peace, and disobeying no law, human or divine, he cannot be the subject of arrest or imprisonment by any one, except at the peril of the offender. His rights are regulated by law, and when he appeals to the law for redress, it is not in the power of any tribunal to say, 'You are an Indian, and your rights rest on the arbitrary decrees of executive officers, and not in the law.'"

This was Judge Kingman's inherent and natural view of the rights of man. He reduced a vague and much-used phrase to practical fact, and gave it a literal meaning in daily life. The terms in which he chose to embody this principle cannot be misunderstood. No man can easily forget the words in which he ridicules the position, "You are an Indian, and your rights rest on the arbitrary decrees of executive officers, and not in the law."

When it is remembered that Judge Kingman was a sick man during his entire life, it seems remarkable that he was able to render such comprehensive and vigorous decisions, clothed in language that is a model of style; and it may well be that in some happier epoch, when our university shall have taken its rightful place among the great educational institutions of the world, his decisions will there be taught as classics.

During the years 1875 and 1876 his health declined and his bodily strength became very much impaired, and it was only by heroic effort that he was able to perform his judicial labors. His associates, with great consideration and loving tenderness, offered repeatedly to relieve him of his arduous tasks, made heavier by his ill health, but his high sense of honor would not permit him to increase their labors or accept a salary that he believed he did not earn. At the end of December, 1876, he resigned his judicial work. While he lived nearly thirty years longer, he never again took an active part in the work of a lawyer, although repeatedly urged to become the head of law firms.

He was the best of the old generation of lawyers. His conception of the duties of a lawyer-one that placed his personal honor above all things else could not be made to conform to the standards of modern commercialism. In the earlier years of his retirement he took an active part in the State Historical Society and our association. During this period, also, he gladdened the lives of his associates in what was known as the "Ananias Club." He had an incomparably sweet and sunshiny disposition all his life, with a keen intellect and brilliant wit. At this club, which he frequented daily for many years, he did not entertain his associates like Polonius, but by a far nobler delineation of character and nature. He ridiculed kindly, if

at all. He did not preach. He saw the humor that is

the strongest admixture in all human affairs. He believed in men as men, and honored women, and loved little children. He never quarreled, and rarely even argued. He respected opinions not his own, yet clung to his own views on great subjects with a tenacity that could not be shaken. A deeply religious man, yet he was the partizan of no creed, the member of no organized church, the adherent of no prescribed form of worship. In his views he lived and died content, and with an understanding sufficient for all his needs.

Children were Judge Kingman's most devoted and admiring friends. The long and sleepless nights made longer by pain were occupied in weaving and coloring the stories he told them by day, when they clustered around him as their best and wisest friend. Completely out of the ordinary, conceded always to be a remarkable man, whether or not he was always understood or appreciated, there were times when Judge Kingman was more than a man-he was an age, as it were. Long before his death he had exercised functions that were unusual. He had fulfilled a mission. He had been chosen to do a work ordained by the Supreme Will, which manifests itself as visibly in the laws of human destiny as in those commoner laws of nature that all may study and understand. In the final analysis, his life was one of devotion, prayer and love for the Master whom he worshipped in his heart. His devotions were in secret, and prayer was the essence of them-that conscious and voluntary relation that is entered into by the distressed and uncertain soul with the Power on which it feels itself to depend, and which guides its fate regardless of all the world may offer or contain.

All I have said is but an inadequate review of the life and work of a remarkable man. It is a difficult

task to describe such a man as Judge Kingman as he was. He was indifferent to all the allurements of wealth and fame. There was never a moment in which he was influenced by the hope of applause. Ambition, in the usual meaning of the term, was not included as an ingredient of his inner life. He cared nothing for wealth; and an honest livelihood, and nothing more, was all he ever attempted to win from a reluctant world. His highest motive was the satisfaction of all the demands of that self-respect that makes the gentleman. He was a humanitarian in the highest sense; a just man, a wise and far-seeing legislator, an impartial judge. Whatever the emergency, he never forgot to be a man, walking in God's image. Honor is but another name for conscience, and his sense of responsibility to that and to his fellow man Judge Kingman never forgot to the latest hour of a life of pain, that was yet prolonged some sixteen years beyond the limits set by him who wrote: "The days of our years are three-score years and ten.” He lived and did his work in eventful days, and he survived to see the fruition of all his hopes in the great commonwealth whose foundation stones he helped to lay. It was to him enough.