All business for the time was suspended. He and his party were every-where treated as Ohio’s invited guests; and the Governor was attended by all the county officers, eminent citizens, and multitudes to the next county line, where a like escort was in waiting with the best livery the country could produce; halting at each county town, for a grand reception, ornamented with speeches, toasts, flags, and firearms. Thus the benefactor of the nation passed from one county to another, across a great state, and as soon as the advance-guard came in sight of any town, the bells of all the churches, public buildings, and hotels, gave their long and merry peels of welcome--the cannon roared and a vast crowd of waiting citizens of town and country marched forward with huzzas and banners of “Welcome--welcome--to the Father of Internal Improvements.” The following extract, written at the time by a cool-headed representative of the state, is expressive without coloring or exaggeration: “The grave and the gay, the man of gray hairs and the ruddy-faced youth; matrons and maidens, and even lisping children, joined to tell his worth, and on his virtues dwell; to hail his approach and welcome his arrival. Every street, where he passed, was thronged with multitudes, and the windows were filled with the beautiful ladies of Ohio, waving their snowy white handkerchiefs, and casting flowers on the pavement where he was to pass on it.” No king, emperor, president, or statesman; no manufacturer of personal or political enthusiasm, even of palace-car order, ever obtained that intensity and spontaneous manifestation as was shown “The Father of Internal Improvements,” on his passage through the state. And it is yet a sorrowful reflection to memory, that such magnetism, ability, and influence for good did not live to see the Lake Erie and Ohio Canal completed; that his life’s sacrifices, in physical and mental efforts for the advancement of civilization in the North-west, have been so soon almost forgotten. But more; that his good works should have been so cheaply recognized at his death by a state he had enriched by making himself so poor. But it is never too late to be just, nor too long to right a wrong. About this time, an era of “_prosperity_” had already dawned in the East, and was heralded from mouth to mouth--from the Ohio river to Lake Michigan--that the “Erie Canal” was completed, and the first fleet of boats left the Hudson, October 26, 1825, laden with emigrants for the North-west. On the banners this fleet carried were the significant words, “The Star of Empire Westward Takes its Way,” and the cannons were heard and answered from Buffalo to New York City.