Ohio, on Ohio soil, that the first experiment of race education began. Oberlin, standing in the pathway, threw a beacon light into the darkness of the night, bidding our sons to come and walk in the way of life; and to-day, thank God, Oberlin is all over the land! Oberlin is established in Florida! Oberlin is everywhere; and men of this race are bid to drink of the life waters.

Is it wonderful that I feel full of rejoicing? that I have no language to tell you what I feel? And, sir, in conclusion, I say to you, Mr. Chairman, and to these others, that in the future, as in the past, we will ever try to be true to the best interest of our country. We, sir, will strive, by the grace of the God that bore us out of the darkness of the night, to stand and sustain our Constitution, and the institutions of learning.

And, while you were hearing of the honorable men and women of Massachusetts, I thought how in Washington, the other day, I went out to Lincoln Park to see the great monument to Abraham Lincoln, in bronze, standing, pointing his finger to the sky; at his foot the freedman with broken shackles; on one side of the monument the freedman's memorial to Abraham Lincoln; and on the other side the inscription that the first money contributed for this monument was $5, by Charlotte Scott, of Marietta, Ohio. Lincoln and Charlotte Scott, of Marietta, will go down through the centuries side by side.

And then sir, we will not forget Charlotte Scott. And the Methodists must not forget John Stewart, the pioneer missionary to the Indians of this land. Down at the church here in Marietta where Marcus Lindsay was preaching in 1814, John Stewart stood outside and heard the gospel. It found way to his soul and he was converted; and in the night he heard a voice which said to him, "Preach my word to the unknown." He paid his debts and started, going to the Delaware Indians and from there to the Wyandottes. There a colored boy, whom the Indians had brought from Virginia, heard him, and was converted under the preaching of John Stewart of Marietta. He preached the first sermon to the Wyandotte Indians, and many were converted. He returned to Marietta, and J. B. Finley the great missionary to the Wyandotte village came after.

So, while you are celebrating this great event, and while

distinguished men have come to represent their States, I have come commissioned by no State; but I am here to represent Charlotte Scott and John Stewart.

May God bless you in the future, my friends, and may we continue in this grand work until our Nation from ocean to ocean and from sea to sea shall unite in the full intent of the Ordinance of 1787.

ADDRESSES BEFORE THE OHIO STATE ARCHEO

LOGICAL AND HISTORICAL SOCIETY.

AT MARIETTA, APRIL 5 AND 6, IN CONNECTION WITH THE CEN

TENNIAL CELEBRATION.

ANNUAL ADDRESS OF PRESIDENT F. C. SESSIONS.

THE invitation to hold the third annual meeting of this Society in Marietta came with singular appropriateness. It is certainly gratifying to those of us who have seen the movement to celebrate this occasion properly to be permitted to participate in these exercises.

The few remarks that I shall make in this, the opening of the meeting, can add but little to the historic interest which attaches to the occasion; but this I may say, that I voice the sentiments of all the members of the Ohio State Archæological and Historical Society, looking back to that day in March, 1885, when a few persons gathered in the State Library at Columbus to form the Society, that one of its prime objects then decided upon, is now being realized. We are not all here who met on that day; one or two of the number are resting that "eternal rest," which another century will bring to all of us; the end of which century another generation will celebrate.

One hundred years ago the advance guard of our present civilization in this part of our country were slowly floating down the river the Indians call "beautiful." Did this band of fortyeight men "The Pilgrims of the Northwest"-realize what one. century of time would do in this part of their country which they were now about to occupy? Then the whole territory, of which our State is but one-sixth, was practically a wilderness. Scarcely a white man's home, save small French settlements, whose people, in the century in which they had occupied the alluvial Illinois bottoms, were hardly civilized. Not a road, not a settlement

aside from those established by Moravian missionaries, could be found in any part of what is now Ohio. The pioneers found a wilderness that promised much for their labor. Could they appear with us in these commemorative exercises to-day, would their expectations be realized? We can only leave to history the

answer.

To an individual one hundred years seems a long lapse of time. To a nation it is short. It lacks but four years of four centuries since Columbus gave to civilized mankind a new world, whose age rivals that known in history as the Old World. Less than two centuries after Columbus came there landed on a "wild tempestuous shore" a band of Pilgrim fathers, seeking in America the freedom denied them in Catholic Europe. Again two centuries and the second band of Pilgrims, whose coming we of to-day celebrate, landed on our "wild Muskingum shores," and laid the foundations of a civilization, which neither they nor their fathers of 1620, nor those of 1492, could contemplate.

I shall not attempt to trace the historic associations gathered here to-day. We stand, as it were, on consecrated ground. On this soil, for the first time in the history of our country, were planted the principles of freedom, education, civil and religious liberty; and here was also planted the system of land-ownership by all people, as against the feudal system that, coming down through unnumbered years of English history, had fastened itself on many parts of our country. I can revert only in the most casual manner to these inestimable blessings, planted on the ground where we now stand. Their results are their monuments; their endurance and their influence, their history.

I may be pardoned, however, if I refer to some of the results obtained, as shown in the history of the century just closed.

When this colony landed there were but thirteen States in the Union, whose people, confined chiefly to the Atlantic coast, were confronted with the problem of building a nation on an untried basis, and whose form of government was yet untested. Sagacious statesmen, looking to all parts of our national problem, saw that a colony, firmly planted in the extreme parts (and this