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Show WHY OHIO FURNISHES PRESIDENTS. The development of Ohio in recent years has been somewhat phenomenal. The pact at which presidents, distinguished general, judges, statesmen, discoverers, literary men, artists, and genin?? of every fashion are turned out of this great provincial civilization to meet the exigent??? of the nation is without precedent. The Ohio of today boasts of as many universities as Continental Europe. Her larger cities have become the seats of a wealth and social refinement rivaling the best cosmopolitan capitals. The city of Cincinnati, recently the accredited center of American musical culture, has also instituted, within a short period, schools, and achieved success in several fine arts not elsewhere enl??? within the limits of the Union. "Very s?? How do you account for it?" says the New Yorker in his ??. Massachusetts accounts for it. She patronizingly admits that Ohio is the "Massachusetts of the West," and complacently complains that Ohio contains a large colony from Boston, and not an inconsiderable sprinkling of other, even if inferior, New England settlers. Ohio in return ungraciously refuses the compliment, and rejects the graceful diagnosis. Ohio civilization is not New England civilization at all. Cincinnati culture is not Boston culture-differing from it even as widely as the pronunciation of the word itself in the re??? cities. The New England settlement in the northern areas of the State, an intelligent, progressive population in itself, in no degrees affect the general characteristics of Ohio society, which is local and peculiarly Western in its development. All this Ohio rightly asserts. Why, then does this inconsiderable territory, barricading between the great lake and the great river, the march of Western Empire, ??? also a precocious and apparently abnormal civilization in the war of the symmetrical development and equable administration of the Republic? An answer equally ingen??? And more plausible? than the Massachusetts one, is to affirm that Ohio civilization is the civilization of the south or northern territory; or, in other words, the civilization of the Southern race under the best conditions of American development. Slavery arrested and ??stly deadened the social development of the cavaliers. Considerably more than three quarters of a century ago Virgins magnanimously ceded to the General Government the magnificent and mighty reach of territory sweeping from her frontier to the southern borders of the great Michigan lakes, and opened up the spacious West to American empire. Into the gap of civilization thus opened first expanded her own population; then followed later an immigration from the stifling civilization of her sister States of the South. Ohio is the child of Virginia. First on her fertile soil came the beggared descendants of her cavaliers, and here under spacious, untrammeled opportunity marked the outlines and developed the ideal of the best civilization of which the Southern race is capable-a civilization bland? blend?, equable, industrious, liberal, casy?, contained, cultured; a civilization demarked and distinguished in its atmosphere and in every galiant [gallant] quality from the society of New England. But if such an explanation appear not a wholly adequate account of the phenomenal Ohio of today, the easy and natural additional reasons of her advanced social condition are not far to suck? sock?. Her superior position, historical and local, as the first of the Western States on which, ??? the Alleg???, struck [unreadable line] the first waves of advancing population from the South and East. Her supreme advantages of fertile soil, garnished with abundant woods and waters and unwasted by mountain ridges, her commercial f?? by great water ranges on her north and south, her royal stand in the path of empire between the two oceans, making her a licensed imperial toilman? tollman? On the commerce of the East and West as it passes her borders-all these causes, taken into consideration with the institutions and culture that come of accumulated and accumulating wealth, leave no riddle to be solved in connection with the present commanding attitude of Ohio in the sisterhood of American States.-[Brooklyn Eagle. |