Milestones }} 



line of the peerless merchants of Boston — who was little known 

 among scientific scholars, yet contributed from the accumulations 

 of his thrift to a higher culture than his own. And I remember, 

 more than all, that the Commonwealth, which from the days of her 

 founders until nownever yet has failed the cause of education among 

 her children, had from the first been the steadfast friend of this 

 Society, giving it incorporation, aiding it in its early years with a 

 modest but saving annual subsidy, and, in 1861, making to it the 

 magnificent donation of land on which its foundations now rest 

 secure — a donation that came not only with the good will and the 

 Godspeed of the Commonwealth, but with all the sympathy and 

 inspiration of the soul of Governor Andrew, who, next to his de- 

 votion to human rights and hate of human wrongs, cherished the 

 love of that enlarging learning which he knew is from the mean- 

 ness of wrong to the nobility of right, the slow but sure highway. 

 And so as one of the many citizens of Massachusetts, and also 

 as one in official station representing her, I am emboldened to unite 

 my voice in the acclaim that hails this fiftieth anniversary of your 

 existence. Memory and imagination — those exquisite poets of the 

 human mind — memory that looks tenderly back over the past, and 

 imagination that idealizes and yet in all its mounting knows that 

 it fails to picture or command the future — are making this occasion 

 not the mere boast of fifty years' success, but a tribute to what man 

 has done, and a stimulus to what man yet a thousand times more 

 shall do in behalf of the happiness, the delight, the knowledge, the 

 ennobling of his fellow-men, unlocking from every nook and corner 

 of the earth, and displaying in every form and motion of life, the 

 beneficence of God. 



