autonomy. These
governments in turn were admitted as equal States of the Union. By this
peaceful process of colonization a whole continent has been filled with
free and orderly commonwealths so quietly, so naturally, that we can
only appreciate the profound significance of the process by contrasting
it with the spread of European nations through conquest and oppression.

Next let me invite your attention to the part played by the Ohio Valley
in the economic legislation which shaped our history in the years of the
making of the nation between the War of 1812 and the rise of the slavery
struggle. It needs but slight reflection to discover that in the area in
question, the men and measures of the Ohio Valley held the balance of
power and set the course of our national progress. The problems before
the country at that time were problems of internal development: the mode
of dealing with the public domain; the building of roads and digging of
canals for the internal improvement of a nation which was separated into
East and West by the Alleghany Mountains; the formation of a tariff
system for the protection of home industries and to supply a market for
the surplus of the West which no longer found an outlet in warring
Europe; the framing of a banking and currency system which should meet
the needs of the new interstate commerce produced by the rise of the
western surplus.

In the Ohio Valley, by the initiative of Ohio Valley men, and often
against the protest of Eastern sections, the public land policy was
developed by laws which subordinated the revenue idea to the idea of the
upbuilding of a democracy of small landholders. The squatters of the
Ohio Valley forced the passage of preemption laws and these laws in
their turn led to the homestead agitation. There has been no single
element more influential in shaping American democracy and its ideals
than this land policy. And whether the system be regarded as harmful or
helpful, there can be, I think, no doubt that it was the outcome of
conditions imposed by the settlers of the Ohio Valley.

When one names the tariff, internal improvements and the bank, he is
bound to add the title "The American System," and to think of Henry Clay
of Kentucky, the captivating young statesman, who fashioned a national
policy, raised issues and disciplined a party to support them and who
finally imposed the system upon the nation. But, however clearly we
recognize the genius and originality of