besides his wife, for Europe. The civil war then raging in America had stirred him deeply, and his had been no slight share in sending to the field the young manhood of the North. Now, arrived in Europe, a new task confronted him. In answer to the pro-Southern correspondents of the London press, who were misleading the English public as to the resources and the character of the North, and bade fair to win for the Confederacy the recognition, if not the intervention, of Great Britain, he dashed off his A Word from the Northwest, perhaps the most telling defense of the Unionist cause; and this he followed up with effective letters in the journals of England and the Continent. Returning in 1863 to the financial cares which demanded his presence in Syracuse, he found in domestic politics a fresh field for his powers as a writer and orator, and in the autumn of that year was sent by his native county of Onondaga to the Senate of New York.
Of this body, in which he sat till 1867, he was, though its youngest member, from the first a man of influence. Against the peace sympathies of Governor Seymour he was an eloquent and effective advocate of the aggressive prosecution of the war. Though a director of the New York Central Railroad and a resident of the city most dependent on the Erie Canal, he did loyal service as an opponent of the dictation both of railway and of canal ring. His intelligent interest in civic affairs earned him a place on the legislative Committee on Municipal Reform, where he was especially concerned in the organization on its present basis of the Health Department of New York city. But it was as chairman of the educational committee, or Committee on Literature, as it was called, that there opened to him the largest opportunities. He was able to carry through a great extension of the normal school system for the training of teachers. What was more, the beneficence of the national Government seemed to put within reach what had long been the dearest dream of his public life.
Even while a boy at the Geneva College, as he paced rebelliously the shore of Seneca Lake, he had begun to frame in his thought the great university, worthy of the greatest State of the Union, by which New York should some day make needless all petty sectarian institutions. When Gerrit Smith had later talked of endowing a university in central New York, he had offered the half of his own fortune for such an object. The dream ripened during his years at Michigan. "It is now just about ten years ago," said George William Curtis in 1868, "since I was in the city of Ann Arbor, the seat of the University of Michigan. . . . and I sat at night talking with my friend, a New York scholar. Professor of History in that institution. . . . There, in the warmth and confidence of his friendship, he unfolded to me his idea of the
