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more or less severely; eighty persons perished in the fall or the fire, and five died after they were rescued. There were other paths which the Ohio people had to open before they could reach a yet wider world than any that lay to the east of them, or the south of them. Their course to civilization lay not only through the woods and down the rivers and over the mountains, but it ran also through the great realm of books, and every log schoolhouse was a station or a junction on it; or rather, as they had things in these days, a milestone or a finger-post. The great glory and strength of the Ohio people, as I have hinted before, came from their varied origin. They have shown themselves among the first of the Americans, not because they were born in Ohio, but because they were born of the Massachusetts and Connecticut men, the New Yorkers and Pennsylvanians, the New Jerseymen and Marylanders, the Virginians and Carolinians and Kentuckians who made Ohio what it was to be by the mixture of their characteristics and qualities here. It is of no use to pretend, however, that it was their virtues alone which got into the Ohio people; their foibles got in too, and their prejudices and their vices. A traveler in our state, just after it had become a state, believed that we were destined to be more like the people of the North and East than the people of the South, whom he then found, in Kentucky at least, much livelier in mind and manner than the Pennsylvanians, fond of public life and society, very hospitable and courteous, but dissipated, restless, and reckless. Our public spirit did not come from our Southern ancestry, but from our New England ancestry. The South gave Ohio perhaps her foremost place in war and politics, but her enlightenment in other things was from the North. It was the aristocratic indifference of the South to public schools that for twenty-four years after Ohio became a state kept her from profiting by the magnificent provision of school lands made for her by the whole nation through Congress. It was not until almost a generation after Ohio became a state that she began to have schools partly free, and it was still a generation later before the men of New England blood framed the present school law, and got it enacted by the legislature. This was in 1853, but in 1825 the first great effort for public schools was made. There was then a party in favor of canals in the legislature, and another party in f
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