The Green Bag VOL. XVII.
No. 8
BOSTON
AUGUST, 1905
JOHN KISSIG COWEN BY HON. JUDSON HARMON ONE of the most interesting and useful fore starting to Ohio, because it would be use inquiries about a man who has won dis ful in that then new country . He took up and tinction, is: How do we account for him? cleared the farm among the hills of Holmes No man develops great qualities by chance. County, where John was born and reared. No man gets them by mere inheritance, John had all the advantages which do so or is wholly the author of his own char much for the development of the young in acter. Heredity must help or hinder. So our land. His father was not rich and had must the conditions which surround him a large family to raise. John had to help during the period of growth and formation. till the farm, and so developed the sturdiness The result, which we call his personality, of body and mind, which, with an upright • falls then chiefly into his own hands for nature, was his only inheritance, actual or prospective. Neither idleness nor ease better or for worse. When we see a man of undoubted emi spread its temptations before him. Attend nence among a people whose standards are ing the public school two miles away in high and inflexible and who acknowledge volved hardship, so its advantages came too rank but never confer it, we like to know dear to be neglected. When the love of the beginning and the course of his progress. knowledge thus awakened led him to the And it is not mere curiosity, for every Academy at Fredericktown, he had to earn American sets his face toward the same the money to pay his way. He had few books, but they were of the kind which promised land. What makes our country great is first, the makes mental fibre. Every day the family choice and vigorous stock of its composite assembled for worship. Every Sunday found people; second, the removal of caste and them in their pew in the distant church. other obstructions to development and their Cardinal Gibbons tells me that Mr. Cowen, replacement' by both opportunity and en more thari any public man he knew, was couragement of development. So when our familiar with the Bible, and gave force and need comes the man is produced to supply dignity to his speech by quotations and il it, not springing up as by magic but put lustrations from it. And he was constant forth as the slowly matured fruitage of to the end in the faith of his fathers. generations of wholesome men and women So, when by teaching school he was able who, often all unknown to fame and fortune, to go to Princeton, he went as an earnest have been gathering and combining the seeker after knowledge, with strength and steadiness for its pursuit and a wholesome elements of character. Mr. Cowen was Scotch-Irish on both nature to select and assimilate it. Pleasure father's and mother's side. From the North and sport were to him only cup-bearers by of Ireland to Pennsylvania, and thence to the wayside. His eye was fixed on the Ohio, was the course of the family. He heights beyond. To him the only fit and sometimes referred to his father as a black worthy laurels of a student were those of smith, but the fact was that his father, a the intellect. He brought to his studies a farmer, and merely learned blacksmithing be thoughtful disposition, a mind eager for
