Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/47

 the reverent sense that somehow placed them in the ideal past, whose problems had all been happily solved, rather than in the real present.

V

But up in the northwestern part of the state, still referred to, even in days so late as those, with something of the humorous contempt that attached to the term, as the Black Swamp, there had risen a young, fiery, and romantic figure who ignored the past and flung himself with fierce ardor into a new campaign for liberty. His words fell strangely on ears that were accustomed to the reassurance that liberty was at last conquered, and his doctrines perplexed and irritated minds that had sunk into the shallow optimism of a belief that there were no more liberations needed in the world. It was not a new cry, indeed, that he raised, but an old one thought to have been stilled, and the standard he lifted in the Black Swamp was looked upon by many Ohioans as much askance as though it were another secession flag of stars and bars. Indeed, it had long been associated with the cause of the conquered South, because that section, by reason of its economic conditions, had long espoused the principle of Free Trade.

This young man was Frank Hunt Hurd, then the congressman from the Toledo district, and in that city, where my father was the pastor of a church, he had won many followers and adherents,