le-ground itself, and the places
selected for the various debates of Lincoln and Douglas marked the
strongholds and the outposts of the antagonistic forces.

At this time the kinship of western New York and the dominant element in
the Northwest was clearly revealed. Speaking for the anti-slavery forces
at Madison, Wisconsin, in 1860, Seward said: "The Northwest is by no
means so small as you may think it. I speak to you because I feel that I
am, and during all my mature life have been, one of you. Although of New
York, I am still a citizen of the Northwest. The Northwest extends
eastward to the base of the Alleghany Mountains, and does not all of
western New York lie westward of the Alleghany Mountains? Whence comes
all the inspiration of free soil which spreads itself with such cheerful
voices over all these plains? Why, from New York westward of the
Alleghany Mountains. The people before me,--who are you but New York
men, while you are men of the Northwest?" In the Civil War, western New
York and the Northwest were powerful in the forum and in the field. A
million soldiers came from the States that the Ordinance, passed by
Southern votes, had devoted to freedom.

This was the first grave time of trial for the Northwest, and it did
much eventually to give to the region a homogeneity and
self-consciousness. But at the close of the war the region was still
agricultural, only half-developed; still breaking ground in northern
forests; still receiving contributions of peoples which radically
modified the social organism, and undergoing economic changes almost
revolutionary in their rapidity and extent. The changes since the war
are of more social importance, in many respects, than those in the years
commonly referred to as the formative period. As a result, the Northwest
finds herself again between contending forces, sharing the interests of
East and West, as once before those of North and South, and forced to
give her voice on issues of equal significance for the destiny of the
republic.

In these transforming years since 1860, Ohio, finding the magician's
talisman that revealed the treasury of mineral wealth, gas, and
petroleum beneath her fields, has leaped to a front rank among the
manufacturing States of the Union. Potential on the Great Lakes by
reason of her ports of Toledo and Cleveland, tapping the Ohio river
artery of trade at Cincinnati, and closely connected with all the vast
material development of the upper