chemist can tell from butter. When we did this some people exclaimed in great alarm, "The cow will become a reminiscence!" But not so, for as the tallow required from twenty-five to fifty per cent. of good butter to be mixed with it before it could play the deceiver, it was found that there was a greater demand for the cow than ever before. Thus we have more cows, and more butter paid for in less confidence. Perhaps we shall one day become honest enough, or have laws potent enough, to save us from thinking every time we butter our bread of the old line: "Where ignorance is bliss 'tis folly to be wise." Down on Canal street in Cleveland where sixty years ago the bullfrog croaked hoarse applause to the nightly pyrotechnics of the lightningbug, stands a great factory, employing hundreds of operatives. At that factory are made yearly tens of thousands of sewing machines, which are sold everywhere on the globe where people wear clothes. What the mowing machine was to the emancipation of men, the sewing machine was to the emancipation of women. The sewing machine meant more and better clothes for the family, less weariness and ill health, more good temper, more happiness. It meant more time for culture, kindness, charity, love. Best of all, like all the grants of science to the race, its fee is eternal. No caprice of power, no statute of limitations can take it from humanity. Till that dread day shall come, if ever it shall come, when "Planets and suns run lawless through the skies," the gifts of science shall abide with us unimperilled by the wranglings of sects or senates, or by the shock of joining factions either in the forum or upon the field. While the man who has been a conscious observer of events during the last sixty years, has seen all these and many more most wonderful manifestations of change and progress going on about him locally, abroad, in the outside world, beyond the range of his personal observation, yet brought to him by the genius of the press, great things have been happening. Verily, if we count the length of a life by the sum of its impressions we must change the standard of measurement-cycles, not years, must be one unit. In the limits of a short address one cannot enter the archives wherein one stored so many proofs of the glory of the last sixty years. To do so would be to become confused and lost. We can but schedule the impressions of a furtive glance, taken from the outside, as we are hurriedly forced along. With all these additions we have had to submit to some bereavements. The house-raising, the husking-bee, the paring-bee, the logging-bee, the annual training, exist only in tradition. The spelling-school is upon its death-bed-a fact vastly to be regreted. Only the stupendous bear story lives in hoary but cumulative vitality. tree. Some pleasing superstitions that many of the early settlers dwelt upon with fondness, and defended with the serious pertinacity of the martyr, have about faded out of the sky of speculation. The seasons are no longer prognosticated by studying the conduct of the groundhog. The entrails of slaughtered animals are not now consulted to determine the future abberations of the thermometer and barometer. Men now plant corn without reference to the phases of the moon. Occasionally we still find a person who will not dig for water without first invoking the aid of the forked bough of the witch-hazel or the peach But such persons are rare, and do not make war, as of yore, upon unbelievers. You must lay the blame of the murder of these myths upon that noble and venerable member of your association, Hon. Harvey Rice, who gave us the school laws of Ohio, and thus set a castle for the protection of thought and the defense of freedom at almost every cross-roads in the state-castles more potent for peace and prosperity than feudalism ever proffered-guarantees to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness more virile than those which Europe seeks to secure through myriads of trained and uniformed butchers, Krupp cannon and armor-plated ships. Turning from the material to the moral, the observer of the last sixty years has noted startling progress. How could it have been otherwise? Shorten the length and strain of the day's task and there is time and energy to spare for thought, study-culture. Thus the individual broadens, and the humanities come into play. The pauper is no longer "warned" from town to town, to be buried at last in a fence corner. The unfortunate debtor is not put in prison. The rapacious creditor cannot take the baby's cradle by authority of the law. Parents and teachers rarely apply the rod to the tender flesh of infancy and childhood. The poor-house, the hospital, the refuges for fallenwomen and incorrigible youth, homes for the aged poor, asylums for the deaf, the dumb, the insane and idiotic-all these are testimonials to the moral growth of human nature, grander than imagination can paint, or genius mould into thought-breeding words. The army which humane agent Wightman leads has no glittering weapons of death, no gilded banners, no waving plumes, no gorgeous trappings and habiliments, yet the commission of its captain proves for human nobleness and dignity an advance which justly dwarfs the glories of the world's past butchers to the low level of animalism that made man-killing possible. Slavery has gone. In its struggle for its life the early settlers of the Western Reserve were its most rugged enemies. Asked in its hour of peril whom it most hated, Slavery would have said: "Not Boston, but Northern Ohio; not Wendell Phillips, with his oratory; not Whittier with his poems, but the Giddingses and Wades with their sledge-hammer logic, and their undaunted physical courage, bred in the rough camps of the pioneer, and hardened into invincibility by continuous battles with the stubborn legions of primeval nature." Juries are loath to find men guilty of capital offenses, and thus to take from a human being that which, if wrongly taken, cannot be restored. Even in theology we have broadened. Who can estimate the vastness of the gloom that was lifted from the human soul when the words: “the lake that burneth forever began to be suspected to be but a figure of speech? It is possible that the vices and misdemeanors that grow out of our amiabilities have increased. Drunkenness, lust and laziness, may be relatively more common, but this is not certain. Indeed there are persons who, with their index finger upon statistics, dispute that there has been retrogression. This we may safely say: if there has been no loss in these respects, the laws of compensation have been measurably overthrown. It is hardly to be hoped that we have arrived at an age when we can possess a new good by paying for it, at least in part, with a new evil. This strike and the boycott which the loose reasoner charges against our accouut of progress is not justly entered; they are importations, but the climate of the Republic is not congenial to them They will perish without acclimating. For all the splended properties of to day we are indebted to those who had charge of the past. Bow then, men and women, of this generation, with profound respect to the little band of early settlers gathered here to-day. In memory stand with reverence by the grave of the early settler who has met for the last time at these anniversaries. The privations of those living and those dead, their toil, their patience, their perseverance, their loyalty to themselves and their posterity, we can never fully know. Imagination can aid us but feebly to estimate the extent of our debt to them. They did not endure their hard lot from choice, hence none can rejoice as much as they that their children are more favorably conditioned, and that feeling must strengthen the aspect felt for them by every intelligent heir to their hard earned bounty. How best may we of this generation pay our debt to the early settlers, surely in no better way than by bequeathing unimpared, but not unimproved and unenlarged, that which we have inherited. Will we do this? Aye. Every day the balance is struck, and we are not found unfaithful. May we not justly claim to be moved with something like this inspiration breathed by these splendid lines from MACKEY :— "The present needs us. Every age And stretch the circle of its ken." Some there are who complain that the young man of to-day has no opportunities, because, as they assert, the rewards of study and investigation have been anticipated-that man is morally and mentally fullgrown. We must have charity for these, for we are all too prone to dwell upon the glories of the past, and to shake our heads dubiously at the future. In this connection, I feel that I can do nothing better than to quote from an address given by my brother Frank N., at Brecksville on the last celebration of the fourth of July. "We exaggerate everything in the past, and ignore all the opportunities about us. We read the history of Rome and wonder at the glory of her empire. Our notions are all distorted and false. Shakespeare makes Cassius, in swimming the Tiber, laud his own prowess. McCaulay, in heroic verse, tells of the exploits of Horatius at the bridge. We wonder that such demigods could live until we learn that this mighty Tiber is a stream but little larger than our own Cuyahoga. Let any of us leave the old home in childhood and return in middle manhood. We wonder that the hills are so low and streams so narrow, but we understand the exaggerations of history. The boy of inventive faculty regrets that he was not born before all the great discoveries in machinery were made. Thousands of boys have watched the workings of the magnetic telegraph and contented themselves by wishing that they might have been born before Morse. Yet all the while the wonders of the telephone lay beneath their hands. We were accustomed a few years ago to see a black cloud of smoke rising off in the north, and we knew it was the black grimy refuse of the acid works, burning in great ponds on the hillside. We passed it and were strangled by the steaming acid and blinded by the smoke. We did not comprehend the fact, but fortunes were burning before our eyes. Some one, wiser than we, discovered a process by which that sticky black mass could be converted into the most brilliant and lasting dyes. He took the analine and threw away the balance. Only a few weeks since, it is said, another man, still wiser than the first, discovered in that mass of nasty refuse, saccharine matter a thousand times sweeter than sugar. We plow the fields of yellow clay, unmindful that yellow clay is composed in greater part of a metal many times lighter, stronger and more ductile than steel, and that the mechanical world would be revolutionized if only we could find a way to get that metal from the soil. Science and the mechanical arts are only in their infancy, and if we could get out of the habit of constantly exaggerating the past and look to the future, we, too, "might make our lives sublime." The very weeds and thistles of the fields may sometimes make us understand they are our friends. Turning to the future, solicitous to preserve and to add to our heritage, we shall find that we have business upon our hands. The greed of capital, the unrest of labor, the interference of laws made to help one class at the expense of all other classes, excessive taxation in the name of alleged public improvements, the threatenings of alcohol, the growing spirit of gambling, and the corrupt politics of the great cities-all these, and |