[On August 26 and 27, 1903, there was held at Shandon, Butler County, Ohio, a centennial celebration of the Congregational Church and community of that place. The order of exercises embraced addresses by the Reverend M. P. Jones, Pastor of the Church, Mrs. M. P. Jones, Mr. Stephen R. Williams, Mr. Minter C. Morris, Mr. Stanley M. Roland, Mr. Michael Jones, Miss Edna Manuel, Dr. W. O. Thompson, Mr. Murat Halstead and Dr. Albert Shaw. The proceedings of that centennial have not been published and it is through the courtesy of Mr. Albert Shaw, the editor of the Review of Reviews, that we are herewith permitted to put in public print for the first time his admirable address delivered upon that occasion. Dr. Albert Shaw was born in Shandon, Butler County, Ohio, July 23, 1857. — EDITOR.]

As this centennial occasion has from time to time been in my thoughts, I have found one idea presenting itself in a more fixed and definite way than any other. That idea is the sense of gratitude and pride we ought to feel in being the sons and daughters of a race of sterling pioneers. It is a great thing to found a nation or a state or a worthy community. In all history we can discover the records of no better or braver people than the men and women who subdued the American wilderness; prepared it to be the home of millions of people speaking the same language and possessing the same kind of civilization, and left to us the heritage of their hope, their courage and their faith.

Our ancestors in England or Wales, or Scotland or Ireland, or Germany or whatever other ancient land may have been very humble, or they may have been of educated or even of aris

tocratic lineage. We are willing, indeed, to know anything about them that we can find out. But, after all, for most Americans it will always suffice to trace their ancestry back to the first of their forefathers who crossed the seas and cast in his lot with the makers of this new world.

Very many, perhaps the majority, of the English nobility' do not run their pedigree back more than two or three hundred years. We have, on the other hand, a great many families in this country who clearly trace their descent from ancestors who helped

create our original Eastern colonies more than two hundred and fifty years ago. April last, I was on the James River, in Virginia, conferring with the men who are preparing four years hence to celebrate the three hundredth anniversary of the first permanent white settlement north of the Spanish post at St. Augustine. New York City has just celebrated the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the town's original charter. Our oldest Eastern universities

have been observing the anniversaries that remind us of the devotion to education of the early pioneers. My own home is now on the Hudson River, and the highway that passes my house was opened almost two hundred and sixty years ago. When Washington was in camp there, during the Revolution, the village was already much more than a hundred years old.

And yet, it was only the merest fringes of our great country that were occupied before the Revolutionary period. It was not until after the Revolution that the great movement of expansion set in, and the United States began to develop in earnest. To

some of us who have been in the habit of thinking that New York and New England are comparatively old regions, it might be interesting to call to mind the fact that in the East, as well as in the West, the country's development has been principally in the past one hundred years.

Thus, to be personal, I might illustrate by saying that while two of my four great-grandfathers were pioneering in the Ohio River country, the other two had gone out from Massachusetts and Connecticut respectively as pioneers to help open the then unbroken wilderness of Vermont. Northern New England and Northern and Western New York are of just as recent development as Ohio. The same thing is true of almost the entire area of the Southern States. There were settlements along the tidal streams of Maryland and Virginia, and along the coasts and the navigable rivers of the Carolinas and Georgia; but there was little or no development of the great interior areas and valleys of those States until well after the Revolutionary War.

Our own ancestors, who came to this particular neighborhood, belonged, therefore, to the true pioneering generation. The process of pioneering went on subsequently in successive waves until it reached the great Mississippi prairies, the plain beyond the Missouri; the Rocky Mountain regions, and the Pacific coast. It has been a part of my experience to have seen something of the methods of pioneering in Iowa, the Dakotas, Montana, and other parts of the West. But the great generation of American pioneers was that which lived and worked in the thirty or forty years following the Revolutionary War- the period before railroads were built, and before river and lake steamboats had come into much use.

This was the generation that floated down the rivers on flatboats, and that crossed the mountain passes with ox-teams and antique wagons. Washington's interest in Ohio had done much. to give the region fame, and the circumstances under which the colonies had ceded their northwestern territories to the Union had left several of them with lands to dispose of, either as free grants to Revolutionary soldiers or else as bargains to homeseekers. The northwestern ordinance, forever excluding slavery from the country north of the Ohio River, had its influence also