Excerpt from Inaugural Address of Governor Adlai E. Stevenson of Illinois: Delivered Before a Joint Session of the General Assembly of Illinois at Springfield, January 10, 1949 I cannot fail, however, to note the significance and perhaps the historical opportunity for you and me in this hour when Illinois is passing from one epoch to another exactly as it did 100 years ago. Historians say that 1848 was a transition year in the history of Illinois. A steel plow to cut the tough sod had, at last, been invented. The reaper had come to our prairies. Plank roads had begun to lift Illinois out of the mud. The Germans and the Irish were coming. With souls, Chicago was struggling out of the swamps. A railroad was creeping westward. Illinois was emerging from the log cabin frontier era and was taking its place in the new industrial day that was breaking upon the Union. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.