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��HISTORY or OHIO.
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��mile is, in round numbers, the limit of comfortable subsistence under modern civilization. It is true that modern improvements in agricultural machin- ery and fertilization have greatly increased the capacity of production, on a given amount of land, with a given amount of labor. It is true, also, that the old countries of Europe do not possess an equal amount of arable land with Ohio in proportion to the same surface. It would seem, therefore, that the density of population in Ohio might exceed that of any part of Europe. On the other hand, it may be said with truth that the American people will not become so dense as in Europe while they have new lands in the West to occupy. This is true ; but lands such as those in the valley of the Ohio are now becoming scarce in the West, and we think that, with her great capacity for the production of grain on one hand, and of illimitable quantities of coal and iron to manufacture with on the other, that Ohio will, at no remote period, reach nearly the density of Belgium, which will give her 10,000,000 of people. This seems extravagant, but the tide of migration, which flowed so fast to the West, is beginning to ebb, while the manufactures of the interior off"er greater inducements.
With population comes wealth, the material for education, the development of the arts, advance in all the material elements of civilization, and the still grander advancements in the strength and elevation of the human mind, conquering to itself new realms of material and intellectual power, acquiring in the future what we have seen in the past, a wealth of resources unknown and undreamed of when, a hundred years ago, the fathers of the republic declared their independence. I know how easy it is to treat this statement with easy incredulity, but statistics is a certain science ; the elements of civilization are now measured, and we know the progress of the human race as we know
��that of a cultivated plant. We know the resources of the country, its food-producing capacity, its art processes, its power of education, and the unde- fined and illimitable power of the human mind for new inventions and unimagined progress. With this knowledge, it is not difficult nor unsafe to say that the future will produce more, and in a far greater ratio, than the past. The pictured scenes of the prophets have already been more than ful- filled, and the visions of beauty and glory, which their imagination failed fully to describe, will be more than realized in the bloom of that garden which republican America will present to the eyes of astonished mankind. Long before another century shall have passed by, the single State of Ohio will present fourfold the population with which the thirteen States began their independence, more wealth than the entire Union now has ; greater universities than any now in the country, and a development of arts and manufacture which the world now knows nothing of. You have seen more than that since the Constitution was adopted, and what right have you to say the future shall not equal the past ?
I have aimed, in this address, to give an exact picture of what Ohio is, not more for the sake of Ohio than as a representation of the products which the American Republic has given to the world. A State which began long after the Declaration of Independence, in the then unknown wilderness of North America, presents to-day the fairest example of what a republican govern- ment with Christian civilization can do. Look upon this picture and upon those of Assyria, of Greece or Rome, or of Europe in her best estate, and say where is the civilization of the earth which can equal this. If a Roman citizen could say with pride, " Cwis Romanm mm, with far greater pride can you say this day, "I am an American citizen."
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