VI. They sowed the seed; the fruit is ours; In patient hope and faith and toil, When work was past To rest beneath Ohio's soil. VII. So labor we for others' weal, By deeds of love That we are worth such noble sires, And love and peace Shall still increase By fair Ohio's sacred fires. At Cincinnati and Columbus, the citizens are laudably engaged in preparing expositions which shall celebrate fitly, and, incidentally, profitably, the material greatness of Ohio; and at each place they hope to gather under the spreading Buckeye tree, the entire crop of living human Buckeyes. This alone will be worth the price of admission, but as I deal with history, not prophecy, I draw the line here. Beyond all question, this paper should contain a section bristling with figures; not those of the rheto:ician's art, but the ten Arab signs which will not lie, and which always suggest in the hearer the consoling reflection that he is gaining something useful in the way of knowledge, and the further satisfaction that the speaker has had as hard a time in preparing the paper as the hearer has in listening to it. These statistics should present the wonderful growth and material prosperity of the State, and show what fruit our thrifty Buckeye has produced while its first one hundred rings were one by one encircling it—Ohio's commerce and manufactures, her thriving cities, her well-ballasted railroads, her excellent school system and magnificent school houses and illustrious school superintendents, her colleges and universities; her coal-of which the trusts and railroads still allow a portion to be dug and hauled and sold; her cheeses and her grindstones; her oil-which the unctuous earth pours forth in quantities sufficient to grease the wheels of commerce and of legislation; her variety of surface, with her Belmont and Clermont mountains, and her Champaign plains, and her Fairfield fields; her equally diverse variety of politics and temperance legislation and weather, and school-boards, her uniformity of textbooks. But all this would demand research, and research demands time, and time flies, while my poor pen, in search of useful information, only crawls, and statistics, "facts, are chiels that winna ding," and neither will they be drawn, fish-like, from an ink-stand. These facts, however, if rightly arrayed, would prove an assertion made by a little boy in our schools in his 7th of April composition, "Ohio is a State of great importancy." Instead of dealing with stubborn things like facts, which surely give rise to a great deal of trouble, and often "set folks together by the ears," let us move in the line of least resistance, and let imagination be our leader. Picture a passenger of the Ohio Mayflower, or one of the company of Moses Cleveland, or, fitlier still, that forerunner of ours, the pedagogue, who manufactured the name Losantiville, and was scalped by the Indians a few days after, fancy him, I entreat you,revisiting the glimpses of the moon, wandering over Ohio and viewing everything with eyes made keen by their long rest, and then sitting down before an investigating committee of the Ohio Archæological Association and sustaining the proposition that there is no new thing under the sun. This is a task, I fear, too arduous for the nimblest fancy, but we can do these easier things. We can see him stand like his grand-sire cut in alabaster and watch his great-grand-son, dressed in a lawn tennis suit, revolve past on a bicycle, and we can imagine his language of intermingled surprise and disgust, but we don't like to quote it, for those days were nearer to the time of "our army in Flanders." He stands with his ear to a telephone and hears the voice of a person whom he supposed a hundred miles away, and when assured that the speaker is thus distant, declines to believe it without the "sensible and true avouch of his own eyes," and mutters something further from Shakespeare anent the world's being given to lying. I have him in my minds' eye, but he said nothing beyond admitting his impression that the English language was sadly deficient as a vehicle of emotion, when he saw go earthquaking by his first express train, and upon another occasion, being tempted aboard and into the sleeping-car, he gazed upon the unrivalled splendor of the conductor, till well nigh overcome by the sight he was brought to again by the sense of humor which came over him at sight of the porter pulling the beds down out of the ceiling. It was an entirely new sensation when he stepped into a quiet little room one day at the hotel, to have the door shut and the room mount upward toward the heavens. Conducted to his apartment, where he might quiet his nerves by a night's sleep, he tried to blow out the electricity. As this was a failure, he looked around for any possible instructions to travelers, but his only finding was a placard which increased his perplexity, for it read : One push for the bell-boy, Two pushes for fire, Giving this up as an unguessable riddle, he said his prayers like an honest pioneer and went to sleep. I said at the beginning, let me repeat and expand a little, that one high demand of the hour is an increase of knowledge, among our people, of our country's history, and a revival of love of our country and its institutions, and an appreciation of their infinite value, not so much, as the Fourth of July rhetoricans express it, as a refuge for the oppressed of all nations and also as a gathering place for the overflow of what all kindreds and tribes have to spare and are often so much better for sparing, but as a home for ourselves and our children, this appreciation and this love, leading to an undying resolve to do our whole duty as citizens, acting well our part in the living present and trust ing for the future that just Providence, who presides over the affairs of nations, and the things seen, the things heard, the recollections indulged, the hopes encouraged, during this Centennial year, will serve as potent though quiet stimuli of the noble sentiments prompted by religion, by liberty, by an ardent love of State and Country. I humbly pray the God of our fathers to make good our hopes and bring it to pass that the Second Centennial shall see the people who live upon these plains and hillsides, and along these lakes and rivers, like us, only with better intelligence and more fervor, thanking God for the Constitution and the Ordinance, for Plymouth, Jamestown and Marietta, for Washington and Jefferson, for Putnam and Cutler. DISCUSSION. GEORGE W. KNIGHT, PH. D. :-When the Executive Committee of this Association, several months since, so kindly invited me to open this discussion, they knew that I was at work upon a sketch of the history of Ohio, and they doubtless expected me to reserve from that history a few things for this occasion. Unfortunately for their plans and mine,another, and to me an unknown, hand has interfered and thus far has reserved the whole of that history for this or some other occasion and use. If then, the committee still desire to attain the object they intended in inviting me here, they ought to call upon the one who stole and perhaps still possesses the manuscript and notes of the illfated book. As it is, I warn any who may follow me in this discussion that they must not draw too freely from that mannscript. My good friend, Superintendent Burns, in the excellent paper to which you have just listened, confesses that he has neither exhausted the subject, nor given us a simple text to expound. In fact, he has but kindly indicated seven or eight topics, each of them, by the way, broad enough for a book, which he calmly intimates he expects those to discuss who follow him. Or, to use and extend his own figure, he has merely broken the ice in several deep and dangerous places, and proposes to have us step in and flounder about until we find firm footing or get beyond our depth. In the few remarks I shall make, I shall strive to touch upon such points only, connected with the "Buckeye Centennial," as seem to me to have special interest to a gathering of educated and earnest teachers and citizens of Ohio. First Of what is this the centennial year? Not simply of Ohio-it is not merely the "Buckeye" centennial, but of the establishment of the colonial or territorial system of the United States. One hundred years ago, the United States first went into the business of planting colonies. Having established their own existence and independence, the original states began to grow and send out shoots and branches into the then far West. Ohio is the eldest of these colonies, "the first-born child of the United States as a whole,-but we must not forget that at the outset she had no separate identity. Her fortunes were merged in those of the great Northwest. Second: What is it that makes us delight to commemorate in speech and verse, in expositions and July carnivals, the birthday of Ohio? Of course, you are all eager to answer, that it is because she is first in her industries, first in her public spirit, and first in Presidential and Vice-Presidential material! We of Ohio are much given to patting each other and ourselves on the back, and I suspect that ere this year is over, our backs will fairly ache and our coats shine suspiciously, from the constant patting that will have been administered. What is it at the bottom, however, that has made all Ohio's development possible that has given the opportunity for these wonderful growths? It can all be traced back to that oft cited, yet ever-fresh, Ordinance of 1787, which, voicing, as it did, the sentiments of the settlers of Ohio, and the Northwest, at the same time stamped its everlasting imprint upon the institutions they planted. "Religion, morality, and knowledge," runs the famous ordinance, "being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools, and the means of education shall forever be encouraged." As I listened night before last to the eloquent address of the president of the State University of a sister state, carved out of this same Northwest Territory, and as my eye lighted upon the words I have just quoted, blazoned upon the arch over the speaker's head, and then as I gazed upon the four hundred and more students who will this week take their diplomas from that institution, and as I thought of the scores of other colleges in the Northwest Territory that are just now sending forth their graduates, I realized as never before that in that famous ordinance, and in the fact that we are living up to it, lies the mostpowerful cause of the greatness of Ohio and the other states that were formed from this territory. Free religion, free schools-here are two things that we ought to remember in this our centennial year. Third: The names of the men who founded this State, who gave us these institutions, who planted these churches, these schools, these colleges, should become as familiar household words to us. The Cutlers, the Putnams, the Devols, the Whipples, and all the others, are those whom we should all delight to honor, and above all, to imitate. Their honor, their patriotism, their selfsacrificing devotion to the cause of liberty and of good and pure government, can furnish to us the best models for private and public, political and industrial conduct in this somewhat degenerate day. These are the first thoughts that come to me as I look back over the century just closing. Of the material growth of Ohio; of its farms, its mines, its manufactures, its oil, its natural gas of all kinds, I do not need to speak. These things Cincinnati and Columbus will show us in varied forms this summer, and undoubtedly that will be the more popular exposition of the two in our estimation which shall show Ohio to be the larger and grander. At the risk of your disapproval, I shall now call attention to a few things that are a part of our history and experience during the past one hundred years, but which we do not often choose to dwell upon. Some facts exist, some habits have grown upon us, some ideas have been developed and consciously or unconsciously fostered, which, it seems to me, we ought to disapprove. First: We have fallen away from some of the high ideals that our founders sought. The framers of our first constitution designed to leave in the hands of the people and their representatives the greatest personal and political liberty compatible with good government. They did not tie us up with petty restrictions that should constantly hamper our political and personal action. Have we not at times, and especially in these later years, allowed that liberty to degenerate into license? Our legislators have been too fond of making ex |