Among the variety of measures which engaged his attention, he took a prominent part in procuring the passage of the act which authorized the establishment of two additional lunatic asylums in the State. His course in relation to the subject of common schools attracted public attention throughout the State, and called forth from the press commendations of a very complimentary character. The correspondent of a paper published at Newark, writing from Columbus, remarks as follows: Senator Rice, of Cuyahoga, has in charge a bill for the reorganization of schools and providing for their supervision. No better man than Mr. Rice could have been selected for this work. He is a model man and a model Senator. Clear headed, sound minded, carefully and fully educated, with a painstaking disposition, he is the ablest chairman of the standing committee on schools that any Ohio Legislature ever had. Deeply impressed with the great importance of the subject--of the stern necessity which exists for basing our whole republican form of government on the intelligence of the people, he has carefully provided a bill, which, if enacted into a law, will give a good _common_ school education to every child in the State, and in so doing, has been equally careful that the money raised for that purpose be not squandered. The bill provides for a State Commissioner of Common Schools, and it has been mentioned to me as a matter of deep regret, that the Constitution excludes Mr. Rice from being a candidate for that office--no member of the Legislature being eligible to an office created while he was a member, until one year after the expiration of his term of office. On the question of the final passage of the bill, Mr. Rice addressed the Senate in a concluding speech, which was published, and very generally noticed by the press. Among these notices, a leading paper published at Cleveland, with a magnanimity rarely possessed by a political opponent, makes the following comments and quotations: Mr. Rice made the closing speech on the School Bill, in the Senate, on the 24th. It was his Bill. He had labored over it, and for it, a long time, and given to it every consideration, and gained for it every counsel, which, by any possibility, he could gain. The text of his speech was the language of the Constitution itself; the duty of securing 'a thorough and efficient system of common schools throughout the State.' Mr. Rice goes into detail on the school bill, and, regretting that we have not room for the detail, we close our synopsis of his very sensible speech by quoting its conclusion: