Rensselaer Standard, Volume 1, Number 4, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 12 July 1879 — Recitations in Ancient History. [ARTICLE]

Recitations in Ancient History.

About the year 752 B. C. the Romans awoke to a realization of the fact that they were almost destitute of wives, and Romulus, who was at that time President of tne republic, called a convention, which “viewed with alarm the womanless condition of the republic.” The chairmen of state and centred committees sent in their reports on the subject, and it was soon ascertained that all the women in the country were in Ohio; that Ohio was just wealthy with women, so to speak. But as the women of Ohio appeared to be unwilling to enter into any entangling matrimonial alliances with their neighbors, Romulus had recourse to stratagem. He began to fill all the offices in the land with Ohio men, and as the Ohio men were very greeay for office, and were ready, willing and anxious to take anything that was | offered them, he had no trouble whatever in doing this. Whenever there

r was a consulate in Madagascar vacant, or a commercial agency in Kamschatka, or a postoffice in Texas, or a deputy collector-ship in Montana or Utah, to be given away, Romulus chucked into it the first Ohio man whose name he could remember. In a little while there was only one man left in the State of Ohio, and he was a deaf old man, with a glass eye and a peg leg, up some where near Ashtabula, and he wouldn’t go out of the State because he was a weighmaster, and didn’t believe there was a better office in the republic. So then, when all the men were scattered from Rockland to Sacramento, the Romans rushed in, collared the Ohio men’s daughters, their sisters and their cousins and their aunts, and married them. The Ohio men were dreadfully angry for a while and disposed, sute nos servis nostris addicerent, to kick about it, but the Romans marched out against then., hujus ergo interfector is esset, and whipped them until they were afrid ipse non Sabines, to say beans about it. And yet this terrible lesson did not seem to teach the Ohio men anything. Twentyseven hundred years afterward, they suffered their State to be depopulated of its male inhabitants by the same old stratagem, without ever pausing to con the lessons of the past, or to think what might not happen to their wives and daughters and sisters. —[Burlington Hawkeye.