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