dignified than one in English. On April 6, a Republican General Assembly passed 57 SB 172, adopting an elaborate new state seal and coat of arms. The coat of arms bore the motto , Latin for "An Empire Within an Empire" or "Sovereignty Within Sovereignty", number 85 on Henkle's list. Governor Jacob Dolson Cox used the new seal and motto for the first time in a proclamation on November 5. Though it was intended to extol the state's grandeur, the motto was thought to be too pretentious and ironically recalled states' rights only a year after the Civil War. The historian Rush R. Sloane would later describe it as "a sort of climax of absurdity". On May 9, 1868, facing significant cost overruns associated with the new seal, a Democratic Assembly repealed the entire statute. Representative Jacob Wolf proposed to leave the motto in place, while Representative Francis Bates Pond proposed to replace it with , Latin for "Let justice be done even if the sky falls". Despite these legislators' efforts, the state was once again left without an official motto. After 1868, there were hundreds of unsuccessful attempts to designate a new state motto. On June 29, 1933, the Senate passed a resolution declaring "Gateway to the West" to be the motto, but it did not pass the House of Representatives. In the early 1950s, the General Assembly sponsored a contest to choose a motto. In 1953, Representative Anna F. Heise O'Neil introduced a bill to designate a state motto in time for Ohio's sesquicentennial, but it was tabled. A 1957 proposal to place "Home of Light and Flight" on the seal would have celebrated Thomas Edison's birthplace in Milan and the Wright brothers' hometown of Dayton. The same year, State Senator Lowell Fess sponsored a bill backed by the Ohio American Legion that would have restored . Current motto In March 1958, ten-year-old Jimmy Mastronardo of Cincinnati wrote to The Cincinnati Enquirer, pointing out that Ohio was the only one out of 48 states that lacked a motto. He recommended the phrase, "With God, all things are possible." Secretary of State Ted W. Brown encouraged him to promote his proposal to legislators and registered him as a lobbyist. He called his State Senator, William H. Deddens, who invited him to testify before the Senate State Government Committee on February 24, 1959. Mastronardo gathered 18,000 signatures in a petition