In less than six months after the issuing of this broad invitation, New York set an example of generosity to her young sister States, which had so much yet to learn in the way of mutual concessions for the general good. And she made no conditions in her surrender. She simply said that she would draw a line across the western end of Lake Ontario, north and south, and that while all east of it should be hers, all west would be forever quit-claimed to the nation. It took Virginia three years to make up her mind, and when she waived her claim in March, 1784, she yet reserved nearly four million acres to the south and east of the Ohio. The year following, Massachusetts came in with no conditions, while Connecticut followed, in the fall of 1786, conditioning that she should retain the magnificent Western Reserve, upon which a New Connecticut was eventually built in the wilderness—that Reserve that has played so important a part in the history, and the moral development of the republic. South Carolina, North Carolina and Georgia, at last straggled, one by one, into the path of manifest destiny; although the century had turned the point of time by two notches, before the last hand was lessened, and the Nation became in law what she had already been in fact—the architect and master of the splendid empire that stretched from the western edge of the civilization of that day, to where the Spaniard and the Frenchman still held a nominal right to the westward of the Mississippi. With these cessions, the territorial system of our government came into existence. That which Georgia gave, became the Mississippi Territory; that from the Carolinas, the Southwest Territory; and all that north of the Ohio River, the Northwest Territory; and this brings us to a point where New York again had a part in creating the State of Ohio, and in dedicating the soil upon which she was reared, forever to the cause of human liberty. It was within the limits of her chief city that the very foundation stones, not only of the one State but of many, were laid with a far-seeing wisdom and prophetic foresight that mark the men of that early Congress as among the sages of legislative wisdom. In the old hall, that stood at the corner of Wall and Broad streets, where the restless oceans of a financial world roll in a flood that never rests, and to which the lines of monetary interest center from all the far-off corners of the land, upon the spot now hallowed to the memory of Washington by a colossal statue of bronze, there was enacted, in the midsummer of 1787, an ordinance that has well been called[10] “The most important legislative act in American History”—there came into existence a law that gave Ohio and Indiana, and that galaxy of northwestern states to the Union; those free states, without which that Union never could have been saved in the day of its imminent peril.