HISTORY of OHIO A History of its Progress Since By JAMES J. BURNS HISTORICAL PUBLISHING CO. COLUMBUS, OHIO PREFACE HAT this book contains, so far as the making of it was his, and what the writer's purpose was, had been written out with some degree of fulness when the reflection came that there would be a table of contents and close upon that struggled the hope that the answer to the second question will appear to the reader who honors the book as a book loves to be honored by reading it. The truth needs no affirmation that the work of educating a people is, by divine and human appointment, allotted to a series of agencies. One of the Humboldts said that whatever goes to make a man what he is, or to keep him from being what he is not, is part of his education. Then, the story of whatever has lent its aid to make a State what it is, or to prevent its being what it is not, is part of its educational history. For a problem easy to ask, but not the prey of the arithmetician's pencil, determine what fraction of the result called education comes from home instruction, from the church and the Sunday-school; from the lecture platform, the political "stump," and the theater; from the playground and the workshop; from the club and the loafers' corner; from the public reading room and the shady end of the news counter; from the family newspaper in that holiest of clubs, around the fireside and the evening lamp; from the soiled volume in the old school library which unlocked the treasures of knowledge and culture for some humble pupil, so that, though his school days were over, his education, his spiritual building, continued. Out of a longer list the writer chose the topics presented in the table, as nearest his purpose. It might be possible, for the day of miracles is not past, to write an educational history by harnessing all these subjects abreast; but the attempt would argue a degree of temerity higher than that of Phaethon, though it could not, like his, set things afire. The only way, and perhaps the best way, was to drive tandem. If occasionally the lines have crossed, will the reader not be pleased to skip the duplication, or kindly believe there is a purpose in it? Sometimes the relation lingered into tediousness. The material was a multitude of items each in itself small and even insignificant to an eye not armed with the lens of interest, but in the mass they picture scenes and conditions passed, or passing, out of sight. May they revive pleasant memories in one |