“And here, sir, at the epoch of 1794, let us pause and survey the scene. It is now thirty-five years since that scene actually existed. Let us, sir, look back and behold it. Over all that is now Ohio there then stretched one vast wilderness, unbroken, except by two small spots of civilized culture, the one at Marietta, the other at Cincinnati. At these little openings, hardly a pin’s point upon the map, the arm of the frontiersman had leveled the forest and let in the sun. These little patches of earth, themselves almost shadowed by the overhanging boughs of the wilderness, which had stood and perpetuated itself from century to century ever since the Creation, were all that had been rendered verdant by the hand of man. In an extent of hundreds and thousands of square miles no other surface of smiling green attested the presence of civilization. The hunter’s path crossed mighty rivers flowing in solitary grandeur, whose sources lay in remote and unknown regions of the wilderness. It struck, upon the north, on a vast inland sea, over which the wintry tempest raged as upon the ocean; all around was bare creation. “It was a fresh, untouched, unbounded, magnificent wilderness. And, sir, what is it now? Is it imagination only, or can it possibly be fact, that presents such a change as surprises and astonishes us when we turn our eyes to what Ohio now is? Is it reality or a dream that in so short a period as even thirty-five years there has sprung up on the same surface an independent State, with a million of people? A million of inhabitants! An amount of population greater than all the cantons of Switzerland; equal to one third of all the people of the United States when they undertook to accomplish their independence! If, sir, we may judge of measures by their results, what lessons do these facts read us on the policy of the government? What inferences do they not authorize upon the general question of kindness or unkindness? What convictions do they enforce as to the wisdom and ability, on the one hand, or the folly and incapacity on the other, of our general management of Western affairs? For my own part, while I am struck with wonder at the success, I also look with admiration at the wisdom and foresight which originally arranged and prescribed the system for the settlement of the public domain.”