as been said, "Beneath the shelter of the
covered wagon in which he started from his village home in Massachusetts
to found Marietta, the imperial State of Ohio was wrapped up. He was
truly a philosopher and a patriarch. He was more than a statesman--he
was the founder of a State."

What says Judge Burnett, of Cincinnati, himself a squatter sovereign, of
the first territorial legislature of the North-west territory? He says:

"In choosing members to the first Territorial Legislature, the people in
almost every instance, selected their strongest and best men in their
respective counties. Party influence was scarcely felt; and it may be
said with confidence, that no legislature has been chosen under the
State government which contained a larger proportion of aged,
intelligent men, than were found in that body. Many of them, it is true,
were unacquainted with the forms and practical duties of legislation;
but they were strong-minded, sensible men, acquainted with the condition
and wants of the country, and could form correct opinions of the
operation of any measure proposed for their consideration." He further
adds, "several members of that assembly were men of the first order of
talents; and, with scarcely an exception, they would all be now
estimated as well qualified for State legislation." Away then with the
idea that there are not in the manly form, the courageous and generous
heart, the clear and self-reliant, though, perhaps, untutored mind of
the pioneer of the forest and prairie, "native countryman," though he
may be, equally with "the exile from foreign lands," or the residents of
towns and cities, the inherent right of self-government, and the
elements that lay broad and deep the foundations of free and sovereign
States! As for me, I had rather trust the interests of American liberty
and the destiny of American institutions to the keeping of the men, who
in the encounter of hardships that make men heroes, have opened in the
wilderness the pathway of civilization, and made its waste places to
blossom like the rose, than to trust these priceless treasures to the
keeping of many of the merchant princes of our eastern cities, whose
warehouses and whose homes are palaces, "whose ledger is their Bible and
whose gold is their God"; or to the still worse keeping of such Federal
administrations as that of James Buchanan--a man in whose veins,
according to his own boast, never flowed a drop of democratic blood.

It is n