The Guthrie Daily Leader

PRECOCIOUS CHILD
For an Ohio Paper Breathes In the Joys of the Territory of Oklahoma,
An editorial in the Cincinnati Times-Star reads as follows: Uncle Sam never had a more promising, lusty and precocious child than Oklahoma. This seven year-old kid is ambitious for statehood. Whether a majority of her people really desire immediate statehood, with its chances, responsibilities and expenses, or not, the fact remains that as a minor Oklahoma is a prodigy. Fired with northern ambition and energy, touched by the poetry and culture of southern suns, she breathes the inspiring atmosphere of the great west, of all of which she is part. Her people and productions are of all three sections. While it is true that Oklahoma is but seven years old, she has a population of 300,000, school enrollment of 85,000, with real cities and many towns, and three or four railway systems traversing her domains.
The past season she raised 20,000,000 bushels of wheat and hundreds of thousands of bales of cotton, and other products in proportion. At her last election she cast 11,000 more votes than the state of Florida, and every day adds to her population, which population lacks in neither intelligence nor enterprise, for she has not only a public school system second to none, but a normal college and a university. In all these matters Oklahoma is not only a precocious child of the union, but a very Hercules, lacking nothing in her equipment of either strength or character for immediate and full statehood.