938 PROPOSED APPLICATIONS OF SMITHSON'S BEQUEST. 



Your committee are of opinion, that it does not come 

 properly within the scope of our institution to impart pro- 

 fessional education; and therefore they recommend no 

 school of any of the learned professions, nor any professor- 

 ships of ancient languages, or others of similar character. 

 It is not, however, their purpose to exclude lectures of a 

 general character on subjects connected with any of these 

 professions, but only to shut out those courses of lectures 

 which treat of them in professional detail. The studies 

 referred to are already provided for in numerous institutions 

 throughout the United States; and it has been the endeavor 

 of your committee, not only in this instance, but throughout 

 the entire plan here submitted, to occupy, so far as may be, 

 ground hitherto untenanted, and rather to step in where it 

 comes not within the province of other institutions, learned 

 or literary, to extend their efforts, than to compete with 

 them in fields of labor peculiarly their own. 



The party politics of the day, on which men differ so 

 widely and so warmly, should not, your committee think, 

 enter among the subjects treated of in any lecture or pub- 

 lication put forth under the sanction of the institution. 

 And they would deeply regret to see party tests and party 

 wranglings obtrude themselves on the neutral ground of 

 science and education ; jeoparding, as such intrusion surely 

 would, the tranquillity of the institution, disturbing the even 

 tenor of its action, perhaps assaulting its welfare, certainly 

 contracting the sphere of its usefulness. 



Your committee think it important that the institution, 

 at the time it is first opened, should have already in its 

 library a collection of such valuable works of reference, as, 

 in the prosecution of its plan, may be required. In order 

 to attain that object, your committee recommend, that, for 

 the present, twenty thousand dollars be set aside for the 

 purchase of books and fitting up of the library. 



An additional reason which has induced your committee 

 to recommend, out of the accrued interest, so large an 

 appropriation at the outset, is, that large annual appropria- 

 tions from the accruing interest, after the institution is 

 under way, are thereby rendered the less necessary. 



In proposing that, in the building about to be erected, 

 there should be provided library room sufficient to receive 

 a hundred thousand volumes, your committee yielded rather 

 to what seemed a fiiir concession to the spirit of the eighth 

 section of our charter, than to their own deliberate convic- 

 tion that a library of more than half that size could, with 



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