The very next thing after a church, when this district was settled, came the common school. The race of which the settlers came was brainy. Their families always had more than a thimbleful of sense apiece. Hence the demand for education, and, therefore, a school-house and a school-teacher. These schools have grown and multiplied. The Reserve has not only common-schools, but colleges, which are already first-class, and are destined to become famous seats of learning. The nation itself has come to recognize in the people of the Reserve a higher average of intelligence than exists anywhere in the Union, except in a very few sections. Here is a very good place to seek for a public man who shall have the kind of intellect to grapple with great questions of statesmanship, and master them. The Reserve was first peopled by a set of men who were not only religious, moral, and intelligent; but who possessed in themselves two requisites of a great people—courage and strength. Their own ancestors had braved untold dangers in coming to the American shores, and had endured hardships and privations innumerable to gain a footing on the rocky coast. Upborne by the tradition of these experiences, the pilgrimage and the work of founding a new State had been gone over by them again. They were a race who sailed unknown seas, climbed unexplored mountains to get into a new country, and cut down a primeval forest. Their descendants would be neither pigmies nor poltroons. This would certainly be a fine place for the production of a statesman who would have the courage to stand by his convictions and the power to successfully push his measures through. The political institutions and political habits of this people deserve consideration. They brought their ideas of how to construct and conduct a State from New England, where the town is a political unit, and the town-meeting a great event. So, from the very earliest time, the Reserve has been a region where every body was personally interested in public affairs. They put a man in office because they thought, on actual investigation, that he was equal to its duties. And, more than that, they held their appointees to strict account. The unfortunate man who proved incapable or dishonest never got their support again, and never heard the last of their censures. These causes have made their political history good reading. Its chapters are pure and strong and healthy. The Nineteenth Congressional District of Ohio, at the time of Garfield’s election, included six counties—Portage, Ashtabula, Lake, Geauga, Trumbull, and Mahoning. They are the eastern half of the Western Reserve. Before Garfield’s first election this district had been represented for many years by Joshua R. Giddings, one of the ablest antislavery leaders of the period just before the war.