already indicated, retained or appointed many unfit men. Edwin P. Whipple, in a lecture delivered in 1845, refers to the "spectacle of gentlemen taking passage for France or Texas, with bags of the public gold in their valises." Along the same line is the following defence of the removals which I find among Mr. Ewing's memoranda:

"There was also another reason and a more just one for this opinion of the public and I may say mandate of the popular will. It had been the policy of the party just thrust from power to retain in office none but their active political adherents, those who would go for them thoroughly, in all things; and the performance of official duty was far less requisite to a tenure of office than electioneering services. Hence the offices had become for the most part filled with brawling, offensive political partisans of a very low moral standard, their official duties performed by substitutes or not performed at all. . . . It was thought wise and prudent to make many changes, and by so doing to elevate, as far as possible, the official standard, and insure a more faithful execution of official duties."

Some of the traditions of the cabinet are worth noting. In the correspondence of M. de Bacourt, the French minister, we get glimpses of Mr. Webster, rather awkward as Master-of-ceremonies, lining the foreign representatives along the wall in order of seniority in service and marching the President and Cabinet in, in single file, at the first diplomatic reception; of Crittenden chewing tobacco and Badger smoking; and of Bell, whom the minister chanced to meet at the home of the Secretary of the Treasury, throwing himself full length onto a sofa and putting his feet on the arm of a chair; all very much to the disgust of the French minister.

I remember a story of the first diplomatic reception which my father used to tell. Mr. Webster, who was much given to the grand manner, asked the Cabinet to meet at his office in the State Department, that they might pass in a body to the White House. He ranged them in the order which pleased him, himself first, little Mr. Badger last, and started the procession through the White-House grounds. There was one man in the line who felt himself misplaced. As they approached the White House Badger slipped around in front of Mr. Webster, and, assuming a particu

larly irritating strut, led the way into the building. The Cabinet were shown into an ante-room, where they awaited the coming of the President. Mr. Webster was magnificently arrayed in a blue coat and waistcoat, with brass buttons. As they were solemnly standing there, Badger stepped over to him and said: "Pardon me, Mr. Webster, but would you mind telling me how much that waistcoat cost?" Mr. Webster, looking down upon him with good-humored disdain, exclaimed, "You egregious trifler!"

When the Cabinet broke up by reason of the rupture with President Tyler over the bank-vetoes, Webster remained. Though all the other members retired, his defection impaired immensely the force of their demonstration, and strengthened the hands of the President. It led to bitter but temporary resentment. I find a memorandum in Mr. Ewing's hand which, though perhaps not quite germane, is so full of feeling that I cannot forbear to quote it. It was written in 1864. Speaking of Mr. Webster, he says:

"The last time I met him, before some difference as to national policy cast a shade of unkindness between us, was in the Supreme Court. I was there attending to my causes; he in the Senate, but waiting for the coming on of some very important case. I met him every morning about eleven for nearly a month-the Senate sat at twelve- and we walked behind the judges' seat and were social. One day I was detained at home. Next morning we met at the usual hour and as we shook hands, he said:

'One morn I missed him.'

This was kindly and handsome, and when I read that on his deathbed he asked for Gray's Elegy, the scene rushed upon my memory with a force that almost unmanned me. How often. - morning, noon and evening, — have I since missed him.”

While we praise those who have reached the highest place in our Government, it must not be forgotten that, though only six Ohio men ever attained to that distinction, many have stood, capable, and ready to fill the office. Out of an average voting population in Ohio, during the past hundred years, of about half a million, but a bare half-dozen have been chosen to the presidency; only about one in one hundred thousand. I am reminded of an anecdote told me of President Hayes by Mr. John Brisben Walker: At a time when during the Hayes administration the secretaryship of war fell vacant, Mr. Walker, among

others, approached the President with the suggestion that he appoint as Secretary Mr. Murat Halstead, of Cincinnati. Knowing that the President would question the propriety of making two appointments to the Cabinet from the same State, Mr. Walker armed himself with precedents to sustain it, and when General Hayes raised the question, he cited them. "Yes," said the President, “I know that there are precedents for the appointment of two men from the same State to the Cabinet. But can you find a precedent for the appointment of an Chio Secretary of War, when the President and Secretary of the Treasury are from Ohio; an Ohioan is General of the army, another Lieutenant-general; when the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court and one of the associate justices are from Ohio; when an Ohio man is minister to France and another minister to Japan?" and so on through a long line of his fellow-statesmen all filling high offices.

We honor the six Ohio Presidents for their ability in snatching the great and coveted place. We honor them more for the patriotism and capacity which they brought to the discharge of its duties. They will be remembered because their careers and character are incentives to high ideals and great deeds. But they interest us, above all, as types of that native American people, which, in the brief span of one hundred years, changed twentyfive millions of acres of savage wilderness into this progressive, happy, proud commonwealth.

ETHNOLOGICAL HISTORY OF OHIO.

B. R. COWEN.

The title to this paper was the suggestion of the Executive Committee of the Joint Centennial Commission. The wide discrepancy between the promise of the title and the performance of

the paper would seem to call for an apology. Instead of which the writer merely suggests that he is responsible for the paper alone and not for the title.

Ethnology is defined as "the science which treats of the division of mankind into races, their origin, distribution and relations and the peculiarities which characterize them."

So unique are the antecedents of the Ohio man that an "Ethnological History" of the state would necessarily embrace the history of those races which constitute most of the civilized nations of the globe, because the most of those nations have contributed in a greater or less degree to make the Ohio man what he is to-day.

B R. COWEN.

The task may be greatly simplified, however, by eliminating all consideration of the humanity which peopled our territory be fore the coming of the white man; that is trom the Paleolithic man of the later Glacial Era, supposed to have lived here, through the vast intervening period of some thousands of years to the recent Indian who was so much in evidence when the real Ohio man made his appearance.

Those who preceded the present occupants were the mere caretakers for the real possessor whose coming these broad

savannas, far reaching forests and teeming hills plainly foreshadowed as the future domain of a mighty empire.

They left nothing behind them which in the slightest degree influenced the character, laws, or customs of the present occupants and are not, therefore, connected, directly or indirectly, prejudices, his fierce and ungovernable passions, his vices, and still

The history of those peoples though interesting in itself, is a thing apart from our history. True, they occupied the territory but they never possessed it in any true sense of possession. It is only by agricultural labor that man can be said to appropriate or possess the soil, and the Indian lived by the products of the chase. He was marked for destruction by his fixed and ineradicable prejudices, his fierce and ungovernable passions, his vices, and still more perhaps by his savage virtues. The coming of the white man with his peculiar civilization was the death knell of the Indian, for it had come to be an axiom of that civilization that barbarism has no rights which it is bound to respect, and that axiom was the rule and guide of the white man's conquest.

So that the Indian has gone the way of the Mastodon, the Cliff Dweller and the Moundbuilder. He has sped away like a bird on the wing leaving behind him no memorials of his passage save his dishonored graves and his musical names which linger on mountain, lake and river to tell the story of his sojourn and his exit. He is gone, but in the crimson trail of his retreat the spots where he made his stand are marked and honored by a people who admire courage even in an enemy, for no aboriginal race can point to a more desperate valor, a more stubborn resistance, or a more dramatic exit.

Yet, defeated and driven from the graves of his fathers, not all the power of our high civilization with its superior appliances for warfare could reduce him to a tame submission, or awe him into non-resistance.

His gallant deeds in Greece or haughty Rome,

By Mars sung, or Homer's harp sublime,

Had charmed the world's wide round,

And triumphed over Time.

To have supplanted the haughty Indian a hundred years ago when the white settlements were widely scattered and sparsely