Many States have been created, many important acts have been passed by the various Congresses that have sat in New York, in Philadelphia, and in Washington, but there was in this measure something that saved the nation from being sometime all slave; that reserved for freedom an empire that by mere stress of moral example if in nothing else, was a menace forever before the slaveholder. In that ordinance was one little clause that made Ohio and Wisconsin and Illinois what they afterwards became. “There shall be,” it recited, “neither slavery, nor involuntary servitude in said territory, otherwise than in the punishment of crimes.” Simple enough these words sound now, when human bondage upon American soil is but the echo of a dead past, but for the day in which they were uttered, they were the clarion call of a new era—the death knell of a monster wrong; and the voice was none the less that of God speaking in human legislation, because many of the men who had become His instrument, had no dream of the great things to which they had put their hands, and to which they had given their votes. So, in one sense, Ohio may be said to have had her beginning in New York. From the days of her earliest childhood, she has been a willing neighbor, willing to give and take of friendly offices with her elder sister to the East. Two of her chief magistrates were the sons of the Empire State; she has borrowed not a little of her legislation from the experience of the older State; she patterned her canals after those which DeWitt Clinton had so largely aided to bring into being; she has developed many of her native resources by New York’s financial aid; she has sought to build her railways so that they should lead direct to the metropolis; she has in a thousand ways acknowledged the commercial and financial supremacy of the greater city and State; and last, but not the least, she has sent scores of her sons to the East, to prove that the Buckeye is capable of gaining and holding his own among the best, in any lines of human labor or human thought—and it is with this subject largely, that we have at present to deal. There hangs in certain cheerful rooms at No. 236 Fifth avenue, a modestly framed document that is more significant in that which it suggests, than in what it declares. It is a call for a meeting, and a pledge of certain gentlemen whose names are attached, that they will do what lies within their power to create in this great metropolis, a hearthstone around which those who claimed Ohio for a mother or a foster-mother, might congregate now and then, for such mutual help or association as would keep the memory of the old home alive in the new. The beginning was modest and quiet, and yet out of it has grown an organization that is in many ways a model of its kind, and that certainly has fulfilled the intentions of its originators.