Ohio rises before the world as the majestic witness to beneficent
reality of the democratic principle. A commonwealth younger in years
than he who addresses you, not long ago having no visible existence
but in the emigrant wagons, now numbers almost as large a population
as that of all England when it gave birth to Raleigh, and Bacon,
and Shakspeare, and began, its continuous attempts at colonizing
America. Each one of her inhabitants gladdens in the fruit of his
own toil. She possesses wealth that must be computed by thousands
of millions; and her frugal, industrious, and benevolent people, at
once daring and prudent, unfettered in the use of their faculties,
restless in enterprise, do not squander the accumulations of their
industry in vain show, but ever go on to render the earth more
productive, more beautiful, and more convenient to man; mastering for
mechanical purposes the unwasting forces of nature; keeping exemplary
good faith with their public creditors; building in half a century
more churches than all England has raised since this continent was
discovered; endowing and sustaining universities and other seminaries
of learning. Conscious of the dynamic power of mind in action as
the best of fortresses, Ohio keeps no standing army but that of her
school-teachers, of whom she pays more than 20,000; she provides a
library for every school-district; she counts among her citizens more
than 300,000 men who can bear arms, and she has more than twice that
number of children registered as students in her public schools. Here
the purity of domestic morals is maintained by the virtue and dignity
of woman.
In the heart of the temperate zone of this continent, in the land of
the corn, of wheat, and the vine, the eldest daughter of the Ordinance
of 1787, already the young mother of other commonwealths, that bid
fair to vie with her in beauty, rises in her loveliness and glory,
crowned with cities, and challenges the admiration of the world.
Hither should come the political skeptic, who, in his despair, is
ready to strand the ship of state; for here he may learn how to guide
it safely on the waters. Should some modern Telemachus, heir to an
island empire, touch these shores, here he may observe the vitality
and strength of the principle of popular power; take from the book of
experience the lesson that in public affairs great and happy results
follow in proportion to faith in the efficacy of that principle,
and learn to rebuke ill-advised counselors who pronounce the most
momentous and most certain of political truths a delusion and a
failure.