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His desire was to go “Out West,” and the particular objective point was Auburn, New York.

The father gave him fifty dollars as a starter, with the final word, “I expect you’ll be back all too soon.”

And so young Seward started away, with high hopes and a firm determination that he would agreeably disappoint his parents by not going back.

He reached Albany by steamboat, and embarked on a sumptuous canal packet that bore a waving banner on which were the words woven in gold, “Westward Ho!”

And he has slyly told us how, as he stepped aboard that “inland palace,” he bethought him of having written a thesis, three years before, proving that De Witt Clinton’s chimera of joining the Hudson and Lake Erie was an idea both fictile and fibrous. But the inland palace carried him safely and surely. He reached Auburn, and instead of writing home for more money, returned that which he had borrowed. The father, who was a pretty good man in every way, quite beyond the average in intellect, lived to see his son in the United States Senate.

And the moral for parents is: Don’t worry about your children. You were young once, even if you have forgotten the fact. Boys will be boys and girls will be girls–but not forever. Have patience, and remember that this present brood is not the first generation that has been brought forth. There have been others, and each has been very much like the one that passed before. The sentiment of “Pippa Passes” holds: “God’s in His Heaven, all’s right with the world.”

* * * * *

In Eighteen Hundred Thirty-four, Seward was the Whig candidate for Governor of New York. He was defeated by W.L. Marcy. Four years later he was again a candidate against Marcy and defeated him by ten thousand majority.

Seward was then thirty-six years of age, and was counted one of the very first among the lawyers of the State, and in accepting the office of Governor he made decided financial sacrifices.

Seward was a man of positive ideas, and, although not arbitrary in manner, yet had a silken strength of will that made great rents in the mesh of other men’s desires. Before a court, his quiet but firm persistence along a certain line often dictated the verdict. The faculty of grasping a point firmly and securely was his in a marked measure. And any man who can quietly override the wishes and ambitions of other men is first well feared, and then thoroughly hated.

One of Seward’s first efforts on becoming Governor was to insure a common-school education among the children of every class, and especially among the foreign population of large cities. To this end he advocated a distribution of public funds among all schools established with that object; and if he were alive today it is quite needless to say he would not belong to the A.P.A. nor to any other secret society. He knew too much of all religions to have complete faith in any, yet his appreciation of the fact that the Catholics minister to the needs of a class that no other denomination reaches or can control was outspoken and plain. This, with his connection with the Anti-Masonic Party, brought upon his name a stigma that was at last to defeat him for the Presidency. Seward’s clear insight into practical things, backed by the quiet working energy of his nature, brought about many changes, and the changes he effected and the reforms he inaugurated must ever rank his name high among statesmen.

By his influence the law’s delay in the courts of chancery was curtailed, and this prepared the way for radical changes in the Constitution. He inaugurated the geological survey that led to making “Potsdam outcrop” classic, and “Medina sandstone” a product that is so known wherever a man goes forth in the fields of earth carrying a geologist’s hammer.