6 pressing considerations, when the inducement of a school section was proposed, on condition of settlement; which has continued to be offered and accepted; the object being marked, by its inuring to the benefit of the inhabitants, within each surveyed township. Those school lands within the purchases of the Ohio Company,' and in John Cleves Symmes's, were clearly a stipulation for valuable consideration. The three college townships, there contracted for, are all the grants in Ohio for seminaries of a higher grade than common schools; and their amount comports but ill with the arithmetic of the equalizing design. In ordinary transactions, a measure, analogous to this pursued by Congress, could not be mistaken; it is every day's practice, without being thought to lay the purchaser under obligation. The same reasoning will apply to the three per cent. fund, for the making of roads. 66 "It is not to be denied, that some distinction may be drawn, in this respect, between those settlers in the military tracts on Connecticut Reserve, and our other inhabitants; yet the case of the former constitutes but a part of the system to induce settlement, and receives, besides, some counter-balance from the actual sale in the purchases aforesaid. Even a gratuity to the revolutionary soldier can surely form no item of bounty to the State, in prejudice to other members of the confederacy; nor can the question of "exclusive benefit" be affected by the circumstance that the grants were secured to us by compact. "But I beg leave to observe, that, beside the consideration thus paid by our citizens, the State, as a body politic, has abundantly remunerated the old members of the Union for the school lands, and all other grants made to her on her admission. "The act of cession by Virginia, conforming with the ordinance of 1787, required that States should be formed in the ceded territory, and admitted into the Union on an equal footing with the original States, IN ALL RESPECTS WHATEVER. It will be recollected, that in construing this provision, there were not wanting politicians, who maintained, that if this were admitted a member of the Union, having the same rights of freedom, sovereignty, and independence, as the other States,' the United States would be placed in the situation of other proprietors here, as respects the liability of their lands to be taxed. No such claim was insisted on at the time of our admission, and the compact exempted their property, to the presumed amount of 14,500,000 acres, from taxation, for five years after it should be sold. The exemption was not for the exclusive benefit of individual proprietors; its effect upon the price of public and of other land is obvious-it added to the domestic taxes, and retarded public improvement. This immunity, at the medium rate of taxation, imposed by acts of the State Legislature, amounts in five years, to more than $900,000. In return for which the State of Ohio has received, 1. The school lands, (if admitted,) which should be rejected from this account, as otherwise paid for. Their amount for the whole State, including the college township, is estimated at about 750,000 acres. It is probably incorrect to estimate these lands to us, by the average of receipts for many years, during which our population had received a prodigious increase, and the country became considerably cultivated. The inhabitants should not be charged with the increased value derived from their labor. Congress, after twenty years experience, has reduced the price fixed in 1800. It should not be forgotten that the price of the public land, sold before the opening of the land offices, was payable in evidences of the public debt; and the value of these securities, at the time of the contracts, should be calculated. Choice, too, was offered of a large region of country; the goodness of No. 16 depending upon chance, and the enjoyment of it remote. The true method would have been, to have estimated the value of the literary appropriations of Ohio in 1802; and they would then have been rated high at thirty cents per acre. 2. Three per cent. on the nett proceeds from the sale of lands in the State, for roads; the amount received, and estimate of that expected, when the land shall be sold, amounting to $600,000. So far as the application of this fund should serve to enhance the value of land, the benefit the United States might have calculated to derive from it, is supposed to have been (to that of the State,) as 14 to 91. If we admit its immediate convenience to the people, to balance the advantages accruing to both parties from the expenditure of the fund, it might obviate objections to charging the United States with one-half. 3. The thirty-six sections including certain salt springs--unalienable the grant clogged with conditions that prevent their being made available, and if placed in the market at the time of their highest and overrated estimation, not worth the lowest cash price of public land under the late system. Allowing the whole of these items, we are left creditors to a large amount. But the more correct statement of this account, will probably be as follows: ..606,250. In order to meet various views on the subject, And still exhibit a balance of half a million of dollars, devoted to national, and not to State purposes. "I think it is, therefore, plain, that in every point of view in which the framers of the reports have thought proper to place the subject, their claim can not be sustained without disturbing the principles of harmony on which the cessions to the Union were adjusted-without a breach of equity towards the adopted members of the political family, nor, in the language of the reports, without a violation of the spirit of our national compact,' as well as the principles of justice and sound policy. 6 These facts are not adduced by way of complaint that Ohio has yielded for a poor equivalent, rights and privileges necessary to place her emphatically on an equal footing. We have asked no favors from the United States, on the score of a hard bargain. We are even less querulous than some of our eastern brothers, who, in order to raise money and the value of their land, offered a premium to their citizens to settle in the west, and now officially complain they suffer by the emigration. The complaint, on our part, is against a scheme that treats our school lands as a gratuitous bounty, entitling the claimants to a donation without our participation-against this agrarian project, which might, with the same propriety, embrace a three per cent. road fund, graduated on the same scale. 66 "I have endeavored to show that the grants to the new States are not favors, and the case the report supposes, of a grant made to New York, and refused to Virginia, will not apply to our situation. In the supposition of an appropriation of the revenue arising from commerce, to education in a favored State, exclusively, the analogy equally fails. A more parallel hypothesis would have been, in supposing a State to have relinquished a large amount of her internal taxes, and her citizens to have paid large sums, in consideration of a grant for their benefit. "If land in Ohio should be specially granted to the original States, and they should retain it, to derive revenue from the cultivation, (which, however, may not be intended,) you are too familiar with the consequences of expending, in the Atlantic States, the public money raised here, not to be sensible of the impoverishing effect, to be caused by an additional drain of the annual rents from a large district of country. "Though the appropriations now claimed should be refused, it can not thence be inferred, that this State will remain indebted for her future rank in the scale of literature, or her children, for the rudiments of education, to the generosity of the old States, by reason of the liberality of the grants heretofore made to her; since it should be remembered that, in 1802, the few inhabitants of our still young, though proud State of Ohio, just breathing from the hardships of their new settlements, under the numerous disadvantages described, without public treasure or domain, concluded an arrangement with Congress, whereby they made a sacrifice to the general prosperity, of an offering so great, as I have attempted to explain." Allen Trimble, Speaker of the Senate, was acting Governor from January 4, 1822, to December 8, 1822, Governor Brown having resigned at the former date. Governor Trimble, in pursuance of a resolution of the General Assembly, announced in his message of December 4, 1822, that he had appointed Messrs. Caleb Atwater, John Collins, James Hoge, Nathan Guilford, Ephraim Cutler, Josiah Barber, and James M. Bell, Commissioners, to report a system of education adapted to common schools. At this period, a strong disposition in favor of unconditional sales of the school land, was manifested in the Legislature; but doubts were entertained whether the assent of Congress was not requisite. An act was passed January 27, 1823, that whenever leases of school lands were surrendered, no lease should afterward be granted for a longer term than one year, with a condition against waste; and the Registers of the Virginia and United States military fund were required to make a detailed report to the ensuing General Assembly. CHAPTER XI. ADMINISTRATION OF JEREMIAH MORROW-1822-26. GOVERNOR MORROW added to his other claims to grateful remembrance by the people of Ohio, a deep interest in common school education. This is apparent from the following passage of his message, delivered on the 2d of December, 1823, at the twenty-second session of the General Assembly: 66 'Provisions for the encouragement of learning, and the support of schools, have been the frequent topic of executive recommendation, and of legislative discussion. Difference of opinion can not well exist as to the advantages to society from the general diffusion of education throughout the community. Indeed, no sentiment is more generally held to be incontrovertible, among enlightened freemen, than that morality and knowledge are necessary to good government. The necessary dependence which civil liberty and free institutions in government have on the moral qualities and intelligence of the people, give importance to the provisions for the encouragement and support of common schools. An interest so important to the welfare of society, and to the future respectability of the State, should not be left on the insecure ground of the force of moral sentiment in each member of the community, for its regulation and protection. However universal the agreement in sentiment may be, as to these views of the subject, there is still ground for difference of opinion as to the measure of support to be given, and the mode in which it shall be administered. In this State there are causes, extensive in their nature, for difference of opinion on the subject. The population is composed principally of emigrants from the different States of the Union, with habits and modes of thinking on the subject, as different as are the regulations of the States from whence they came. It will, then, require concessions of opinion, and the abandonment of early prepossessions to be made, before we arrive at a |