54 SMITHSONIAN BEQUEST. 



the decision; but whon the proverbial delays of chancery are consid- 

 ered (and they could hai'dly have become a proverb without some 

 foundation), it may not, perhaps, be thought wholly out of place. 

 Although neither the counsel nor solicitors gave their previous advice 

 to the course, it being a point of conduct for my decision rather than 

 of law for theirs, it is yet satisfactory to be able to state that they 

 approved it afterwards. They regarded it as best consulting the inter- 

 ests of the United States, on every broad view of a case where a great 

 moral object, higher than the pecuniary one, was at stake, enhancing 

 the motives for rescuing it, at the earliest fit moment, from all the 

 unavoidable risks and uncertainties of the future. A fortnight has 

 not elapsed since it was said in the House of Commons by an able 

 member that "a chancery suit was a thing that might begin with a 

 man's life and its termination be his epitaph." 



On the whole, I ask leave to congratulate the President and your- 

 self on the result. A suit of higher interest and dignity has rarely, 

 perhaps, been before the tribunals of a nation. If the trust created 

 by the testator's will be successfully carried into effect by the enlight- 

 ened legislation of Congress, benefits may flow to the United States 

 and to the human famil}^ not easy to be estimated, because operating 

 silently and gradually throughout time, yet operating not the less 

 effectually. Not to speak of the inappreciable value of letters to indi- 

 vidual and social man, the monuments which they raise to a nation's 

 glory often last when others perish, and seem especiall}^ appropriate 

 to the glory of a republic whose foundations are laid in the presumed 

 intelligence of its citizens, and can only be strengthened and per- 

 petuated as that improves. May I also claim to share in the pleasure 

 that attends on relieved anxiety now that the suit is ended? 



I have made inquiries from time to time in the hope of finding out 

 something of the man, personally a stranger to our people, who has 

 sought to benefit distant ages by founding, in the capital of the Ameri- 

 can Union, an institution (to describe it in his own simple and com- 

 prehensive language) " for the increase and diffusion of knowledge 

 among men." I have not heard a great deal. What I have heard and 

 may confide in amounts to this: That he was, in fact, the natural son of 

 the Duke of Northumberland; that his mother was a Mrs. Macie,^ of 



^ His mother was Elizabeth Hungerford Keate Macie, being at the time of his birth, 

 in 1765, the widow of James Macie, a country gentleman of an old family resident 

 at Weston, near Bath. She was of the Hungerfords of Studley, a great grandniece 

 of Charles, Duke of Somerset, through whom she was lineally descended from 

 Henry the Seventh, and was cousin of that Elizabeth Percy who married Hugh 

 Smithson (who later became Duke of Northumberland, and by act of Parliament 

 took the name of Percy) . 



She inherited the property of the Hungerfords of Studley in 1766, on the death 

 of her brother, Lumley Hungerford Keate, a matter of interest as indicating the 

 probable source of a considerable portion of the Smithson bequest. (S. P. Langley, 

 The Smithsonian Institution, 1846-1896, History of its First Half Century, 1897.) 



