any man in our public life during this long period
merits more than he the name of statesman, it would be hard to say who
he may be. But in his boyhood he gave promise of anything but the sort
of career which he has dignified. He had all the impulsiveness of his
famous brother, General Sherman, and something more than his turbulence.
He himself, with that charming frankness which seems peculiarly a
Sherman trait, tells in his autobiography what reckless things he did,
even to coming to blows with his teacher; but all this heat seems later
to have gone to temper a most manly and courageous character for a
career of the greatest public usefulness.

[Illustration: William McKinley 271L]

He was born at Lancaster in 1810, and the second President who has
called him from the Senate to a seat in his cabinet was born at Niles in
Trumbull County, in 1844. William McKinley entered the army as a private
in the famous 23d Ohio, when he was only seventeen, and fought through
the war. When it ended he had won the rank of brevet major, but he had
then his beginning to make in civil life. He studied law, and settled
in Canton, where he married, and began to be felt in politics. He was
thrice sent to Congress, and then defeated; but in 1896 he was elected
the fifth President of the United States from the state of Ohio.

It is a long step backward in time, in fact more than a hundred years,
before we reach the birthday, in 1794, of Thomas Corwin, one of the most
gifted Ohioans who has ever lived.

[Illustration: Thomas Corwin 272R]

He was born in Kentucky and was brought, a child of four years, by his
parents to Ohio, when they settled at Lebanon in Warren County. He grew
up in the backwoods, but felt the poetry as well as the poverty of the
pioneer days, and it is told that the great orator showed his passion
for eloquence at the first school he attended. He excelled in
recitations and dialogues; but he was not meant for a scholar by his
father and he was soon taken from school, and put to work on the farm.
In the War of 1812 he drove a wagon in the supply train for General
Harrison's army, and the people liked to call him the Wagoner Boy, when
he came forward in politics. A few years later he read law, and with
the training which he had given himself at school as well as in the
old-fashioned debating societies which flourished everywhere in that
day, he quickly gained standing at the bar as an advocate. He was
all-powerful with