OHIO SOCIETY OF NEW YORK grandson of Virginia, that is to say, my grandfather (my father's father) was born in Virginia, and that makes me once a grandson of Virginia, and, in common with most of you, I am a son of Ohio, and Ohio is a daughter of Virginia, and that makes me twice a grandson of Virginia. "I presume it is time to get around to my subject. I went into the library of the Ohio Society of New York, where they keep those 'weakly' papers the other night, and looked over such records and books as they had bearing upon the constitutional convention of 1802; and then I went to a stenographer and dictated a speech. I read it this evening before I came here and concluded it was not worth reading to you; but the subject, whether the speech be interesting or not, is a very interesting one. The state of Ohio is simply a part of that great northwest territory which com- prised the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and a portion of Minnesota. " To understand the constitutional convention of 1802 you must for a moment go back of that year. There was a controversy as to where this northwest territory was to go at the end of the Revolutionary War; and, just twenty years before the state constitution was made, in 1782, the com- missioners on the part of the government of Great Britain and her re- volted colonies in the United States were endeavoring to fix a boundary line. The American commissioners said it must be the chain of the great lakes, and the British commissioners said the Ohio River. Benjamin Franklin, probably the most astute man this country has ever produced, for some reason which at this distance does not appear to be clear, was in favor of yielding to the British commissioners, and let the boundary line be the Ohio River; but Jay and Adams said, 'No, we will go back to America and carry on war forever before we will give up the line of the Great Lakes.' (Great applause.) And they carried the day, and that is why Ohio is a part of the United States and not a part of the Dominion of Canada. Then five years later came the great Ordinance of 1787, an Ordinance sometimes attributed to Thomas Jefferson, but really belonging in every essential to Nathan Dane. There are two things in that ordinance that must be mentioned before you come to the constitutional convention. The first is this declaration: ' There shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude.' Bear in mind that slavery then existed almost all over this country, not as we had it forty years ago in the South, but nearly every state in the union was a slave state. None were so strenuous for slavery when the Constitution of the United States was made as the Northern states. The second declaration as embodied and written into that great ordinance is, ' Schools and means of education shall be encouraged forever.' That is the language of the ordinance of 1787; and, before these great men met at Chillicothe in 1802, there was a chart laid 885.