INTRODUCTORY.

Two great epochs in the history of the vast empire lying west of the Allegheny range, and north of the Ohio river, were the Ordinance of 1787, erecting the Northwest Territory, and the Constitution of 1802, adding the eighteenth state to the Union.

The first marked the history of a colony of almost boundless resources and possibilities; the second, the genesis of a commonwealth which addcd lustre to civilization and progress from the hour of its nativity.

The threatened deterioration of our political system of representative self-government was checked when the founders of Ohio launched the new commonwealth on the sea of political activity and progressive republican thought an achievement.

The Ordinance of 1787 was an inspiration. The state of Ohio was the fulfillment of the prophecy it contained. The congested and dwarfed thought of the original states, not yet beyond the enervating shadow of European systems, corrugated with the dehumanizing prejudices and superstitions of centuries, running back to the Dark Ages, found a new and generous field in which to develop and expand, quickly reflecting its broader thought, loftier hope and aspiration and more exalted ideals, eastward to the Atlantic, while it carried the standard of the higher civilization to and across the Father of Waters, over the lofty peaks of the Sierras, and planted it in triumph upon the zephyr-kissed shores of the Pacific.

One by one new stars came out to join the lustrous procession of the eighteenth, till they clustered in splendor from the headwaters of the Ohio to the northern lakes, and thence to the Golden Gate and the Rio Grande. Ohio has indeed been great in all that goes to make up the real greatness of a free commonwealth.

Her sons and daughters may well be proud of her record, which forms an epic, grander than any classic page--prouder than the annals of all preceding empires.

Her founders came fresh from the fields and fires of the Revolution, imbued with lofty purposes and noble ambitions; instinct with prophecy, and militant in the religion of humanity.

Like tiny rivulets they came coursing through the gaps of the Appalachian range from its northern extremity southward to the where its blue peaks smiled to the tepid waters of the gulf stream-a new Trojan pilgrimage, charmed and inspired with the descriptions of daring traders and men and women returning from barbarian captivity, of a new world more splendid than Plato's dream-of a Paradise that only awaited the pruning hand of civilization to make it the premier diamond in the matchless crown of the young republic.

As time passed these tiny streams grew into a mighty river of onrushing humanity, before whose infiuence the forests melted away and the log cabin,

E. M. STANTON

the farmhouse, the hamlet, the town and then the city, rose like genii responsive to the wand of the magician.

And what noble and heroic women, and strong, patriotic men they were! In their religion there were no creeds but humanity and the love of liberty, and in the homes they reared, fidelity helpful love and filial piety and respect were the guardian cherubim of the never-dying mortality with which the foundations of the state were cemented.

The herald roll of names that graced the four decades following 1788 would take precedence over the roster of the Golden Age or the Blue Book of the foremost kingdom of all time.

What Ohio is today she owes to the fathers and mothers, who reared a race of men and taught them to put duty before convenience and write principle in a lexicon where no such word as policy, the polite substitute

for diplomacy, chicane and mendacity, was to be found.

In 1803 Ohio had a population of 47,000 and stood eighteenth in the order of the sisterhood of states. In 1840 she stood third in population and all the elements of greatness. In 1890, through the genius of the census taker, Illinois was temporarily given her station, but in 1900, when her original population will be multiplied by 100, she proposes to take her place once

more.

Not only has she multiplied her population by 100 in less than a century, but her wealth by 250, and annually spends for common school education more than 150 times the total state revenues in 1803.

She was born a quarter of a century after the immortal declaration and

rescript of our liberties, but in the second war of independence, when a little miss of but 10 summers, she furnished 20,000 heroic soldiers of all arms in the War of 1812, and the hostilities leading immediately thereto more than onefifth of all the soldiers of the Union, who made Old Glory's title clear to the New World in that memorable struggle.

She sent 5,500 men to hew the way from the Rio Grande to the Halls of the Montezumas, in 1846, and was ready to multiply that number by 10 had there been a necessity

In the great civil war, when the republic passed the final fiery test, she set her squadrons, numbering 340,000, afield in the forefront of battle, oneseventh of all the armies, one in seven of her population, one-half her sons of the military age, and of these one in 14 died as the soldier dies, on the field of battle or in the groaning hospital

In the Spanish-American war, ere the bugle call to arms had ceased to reverberate through her hills and valleys and across her green and waving fields, she tendered to the government 16,900 soldiers, 2,000 in excess of her allotment, while 100,000 of her patriotic young and middle-aged men appealed in vain to be enrolled in the country's service.

Four citizens of the state have been chosen president-five presidents born upon her fruitful soil. In camp and military council she has been nobly represented by the foremost military chieftains of the century. In the senate, in congress, in the cabinet, on the bench and in the department of state her statesmen, jurists and diplomats have been second to none.

Her sons not only founded this great state, but, leading the march of progress, founded colonies which grew into states from the source of the Mississippi to its junction with the Ohio, and thence west and northwest and southwest, across the trackless, arid plains to and over the Sierras, through the modulated foothills and broad savannas to the Golden Gate of the Pacific, and the threshold of the occident, until, from a score of mighty commonwealths, they sit in the nation's councils untutored in sycophancy and intrigue; unlearned in the cold indifference of selfishness and chicane, but robust in American manhood, and as frank and open as the sunlight and the wind that ripen and sway the harvests in fields as countless as the stars, and as beautiful as they.

We read with pardonable native pride on every page of current history of the distinguished positions in art and literature and law and theology and science and politics and economics, held by the sons and daughters of Ohio, not in Ohio alone, but in almost every state and almost every city in the Union. And as long as their generations emulate the virtues of their illustrious ancestry, the star of our civilization will shine in the zenith, as shone the Star of Bethlehem above the rim of the orient, to usher in the natal day of Him who broke the manacles of Creed and opened the gates of Paradise to the poor and humble as well as to the opulent and powerful.

We are twitted about the "Ohio Idea" sometimes, but will the jesters tell us whence came any of the great ideas moulded into the policy of the nation during the past half century, but from the fertile and versatile soll

of Ohio? I was an Ohioan who, at the beginning of the war, evolved a financial system which kept the countless battalions afield until the integrity of the Union was put beyond cavil. It was an Ohio man, who as the minister of war, directed the mighty operations of these battalions. It was an Ohio man who led them through the bitter struggle and the final triumph. It was an Ohio man whose legions swept from Atlanta to the sea, delivering to the Confederacy its first fatal blow-a blow that reached to the apple tree at Appomattox, where an Ohio man exemplified Ohio's great ideas by sending the captured Confederates home, unshackled freemen, his very act kindling in their hearts the fires of loyalty and patriotism which long since burned out all hatreds and prejudices.

Franklin, a Massachusetts man, chained the lightning, but he was a dangerous giant, and his utility problematic, until Edison, an Ohio man, more than a century later, tamed him and revolutionized the world-turning night into day with his brilliant rays and setting an empire's machinery in motion with his resistless and silent power. These things are not the result of a mere accident. They result from a clearly defined cause. They are the natural result of a virile and a broad-based civilization,springing into activity and power, here within the confines of Ohio, and in strict conformity with natural, moral and physical laws.

Read of the founding of the ancient states, and the elemental constituents were as naught compared with that of Ohio. A single race or a single sect made up the founders of the ancient state. There was no combining and affiliation of strong elements, which became stronger and better by the union. No empire or state mentioned in history embraced so many elements at its birth, and during its early growth, as Ohio. In the sunset of the seventeenth and the morning of the eighteenth centuries, a few intermittent heralds and pursuivants of the coming civilization came into and crossed some portion of the Miami valley, blazing the future march of empire, and startling the puny civilization of Europe with their wonderful narratives, but not until the close of the revolutionary epoch did the tide of venturesome civilization rise to the Appalachian summits and trickle down into the Ohio basin in forceful streams, constantly fed and constantly augmented by those whose gaze was fixed upon the evening star.

They comprised the children of every family of the Aryan race all the strongest elements of European civilization. Celt and Gaul; Pict and Scot; Saxon, Dane, Norman and Briton; Teuton and Latin; Roundhead, Cavalier, Hugenot and Puritan; Covenanter and Dissenter; Calvinist and Lutheran; Catholic and Protestant, they marched abreast under the single banner of civilization, and gave the first exemplification not of the right alone, but of the practice of worshiping God according to the dictates of their own conscience, while each respected his fellow who followed the same practice.

Think of these varying elements and the remote generations from which they had descended. Some from the dwellers of ancient Memphis and from the artisans of the Pyramids. Others dated back to the events of the Roman empire, or to Marathon, or Thermopylae. Still others could trace their lineage