Repository: UIHistories Project: Board of Trustees Minutes - 1884 [PAGE 79]

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83 About the great lakes lies a coronet of grand states, like the stars" in the constellation of the Northern Crown. New York is the brightest jewel in the east, Illinois in the west, while Pennsylvania and Ohio lie between. In population, in wealth, in every form of active vital force, these states singly surpass any other states of the Union, and in the aggregate they dominate all the rest. For the last thirty years the President of the United States has been chosen from one of these states, and during all that time the occupant of that great office has but once come from elsewhere. In the next thirty years, as in the past thirty years, Illinois may safely.be counted one of the four leading states of the Union. The place she will occupy in this quartette is of less consequence; though by reason of her larger area, her greater ratio of useful soil, and the assured predominance of her chief city, it may not be unreasonable to suppose that even by the end of the passing decade she will have outrun Ohio. But let us set all ideas of rivalry aside. There is vastly more of mischief than of good in state rivalry, state prides state glorification. All the states are simply integers in that larger integration which absorbs all, and unifies all, and consolidates all in the grander, nobler, and more glorious nation, the United States of America. One who has lived long enough in each of eight, different states to become a voter in each, who has learned to love them all, to honor them all, to revere them all, to find a home and friends in all, to be jealous for the reputation and anxious for the welfare of them all, has from them all learned the lesson that state lines are the most insignificant of boundaries; that the air is as free, friendship as sweet, liberty as dear, patriotism as bouyant, and all that makes life lovely or noble is as abundant on the north side of the homely rail fence that happens to mark the parallel of 42 degrees and 30 minutes, which parallel divides Illinois from Wisconsin, as on the south side of the same rustic barrier. A man's citizenship in America reaches from the lakes to the gulf, and from the eastern to the western sea. His patriotism should be as broad as his citizenship. Yet there is a reasonable satisfaction, there may arise a proper pride from the remembrance that one is a part of a great whole, whether that whole be the nation, or the state, or'the city, or any lesser organization of which he is a part. May it not be a cause for congratulation, as well as of profound interest and of serious reflection, that within the possible lifetime of most who are here present, within the probable view of all the younger men of this audience, Illinois shall have within its borders five millions of people, and at least $4,000,000,000 of visible and tangible wealth; that that wealth must be chiefly of a sort which will be generally distributed among the people; that therewith shall exist all the intelligence and influence, the comfort and culture, the advancement in education, morals, religion, which nature, and art, and sturdy, persistent effort will make the necessary adjuncts to such a gathering of people, such an increase and aggregation of wealth, amid the surroundings of the closing nineteenth century. Whose things shall these be? Illinois will for many years remain one of the dominant powers