le share
with Maine, our own great frontier State, those vast lumber
interests, for which it has been our own policy to demand
protection. Daughter of three mighty lakes, she takes a large
share in our vast inland commerce. Her people are brave,
prosperous and free. They have iron in their soil, and iron
in their blood. Great as is her wealth and her material interest,
she shares with Massachusetts the honor of being among the
foremost of American States in educational conditions. Massachusetts
is proud to--

Claim kindred there, and have the claim allowed.

"But our guest brings to us more than a representative title
to our regard. The memory of some of us goes back to the
time when, all over the great free Northwest, the people seemed
to have forgotten to what they owed their own prosperity.
The Northwest had been the gift of Freedom to the Republic
on her birthday. In each of her million homes dwells Liberty,
a perpetual guest. But yet that people in Illinois and Michigan
and Indiana and Ohio seemed for a time to have forgotten their
own history, and to be unworthy of their fair and mighty heritage.
They had been the trusted and sturdy allies of the slave power
in the great contest for the possession of the vast territory
between the Mississippi and the Pacific. The old leaders,
Douglas in Illinois and Cass in Michigan, who ruled those
States with an almost despotic power, sought to win the favor
of the South for their aspirations for the Presidency by espousing
the doctrine of squatter sovereignty, under which the invaders
from the slave States hard by, without even becoming residents
in good faith, might fix forever the character of that fair
domain. At that time a young knight, a figure of manly courage
and manly strength, came forward to challenge General Cass
to a struggle for the supremacy in Michigan. It was our guest
of this evening. As you all know, the young champion vanquished
the veteran warrior in a trial by battle for the freedom of
the Continent. I met him at Buffalo in 1854, in the height
of the conflict, at a gathering of a few gentlemen to concert
measures for sustaining, aiding and arming the Free State
immigrants in Kansas. He was the leader and the life of
the company. Many of those immigrants had gone from Worcester
County, where the Emigrants' Aid Society was first devised
by Edward Hale and organized by Eli Thayer. I met him again
when I went to Washington in 1869. I f