TWENTY-SIXTH CONGRESS, 1839-41. 213 



of the subject. Had it been his intention to found a college 

 or university for the purposes of education, it seems impos- 

 sible that he should have avoided the use of words necessa- 

 rily importing them : the words school, college, university, 

 institution of learning, would have been those most appropri- 

 ate to the specification of his design ; and it is not imagin- 

 able that, having such an intention, he should studiously 

 have avoided the use of every word most appropriate for 

 its designation. The increase and diffusion of knowledge 

 among men, present neither the idea of knowledge already 

 acquired to be taught, nor of childhood or youth to be in- 

 structed ; but of new discover}' — of progress in the march 

 of the human mind — of accession to the moral, intellectual, 

 and physical powers of the human race — of dissemination 

 throughout the inhabited globe. 



And if education had been his design, why should he have 

 selected the city of Washington for the seat of his institute, 

 and the United States of America for his trustees ? In the 

 land of his nativity there were children and youth needing 

 and destitute of the blessings of education, in multitudes 

 far exceeding those which might have been found in the 

 city of Washington, or throughout the ISTorth American 

 Union. In the land of his habitation and of his decease 

 there swarmed around him, ever present to his eyes, num- 

 berless children and minors, to whom an institute of learn- 

 ing would have been far more beneficial than it could 

 possibly be to the children of the city of Washington, or of 

 the whole United States. Mr. Smithson had no personal 

 relations with this country ; he had never visited its shores ; 

 nor from the provisions of his will, nor from anything that 

 has been ascertained of his life, does it appear that he was 

 ever intimate, or even acquainted, with any one native citi- 

 zen of this Union. Why, then, should he devote the whole 

 of an ample fortune to the education of a comparatively 

 small number of children in a hemisphere distant from 

 that in which he was born, had lived, and was to die, and 

 with which he could have no sympathy other than that of a 

 common nature, and common principles of moral and polit- 

 ical truth ? 



Mr. Smithson's bequest was not to the city of Washing- 

 ton, but to the United States of America. His reason for 

 fixing the seat of his institution at Washington obviously 

 was, that there is the scat of Government of the United 

 States ; and there the Congress, by whose legislation, and 

 the Executive, through whose agency, the trust committed 

 to the honor, intelligence, and good faith of the nation, is 



