TWENTY-EIGHTH CONGRESS, 1843-1845. 281 



July, 1836) — to this application of the money the faith of the United 

 States is hereby pledged." The donor is in his grave. There is no 

 chancellor to compel us to redeem our pledge, and there needs none. 

 Our own sense of dut}^ to the dead, and the living, and the unborn who 

 shall live — our justice, our patriotism, our policy, common honesty, 

 common decorum, urge us, and are enough to urge us, to go on, with- 

 out the delaj^ of an hour, to appropriate the bounty according to the 

 form of the gift. I thank the Senator, therefore, for introducing a 

 bill with which, to my own knowledge, he has taken much — and, so 

 far as I can see or conceive — -disinterested pains, and which affords us 

 an opportunity to discharge a plain duty, perhaps too long delayed, 



I think, too, sir, that the Senator has, in the first section of the bill, 

 declared the true fundamental law according to which this fund ought 

 to be permanently administered. He lends to the United States the 

 whole sum of |508,318 actually received out of the English chancery, 

 from the 3d of December, 1838, when it was received, at an interest of 

 6 per cent per annum. He leaves the sum of $209,103, which is so 

 much of the interest as will have accrued on the 1st day of Jul}^ next, 

 to be applied at once to the construction of buildings, the preparation 

 of grounds, the purchase of books, instruments, and the like; and then 

 appropriates the interest, and the interest only, of the original prin- 

 cipal sum for the perpetual maintenance of the institution, leaving the 

 principal itself unimpaired forever. This, all, is exactly as it should be. 



But when you examine the bill a little further, to discern what it is 

 exactly which this considerable expenditure of money is to accom- 

 plish — when you look to see how and how much it is going "to increase 

 and diffuse knowledge among men," I am afraid that we shall have 

 reason to be a little less satisfied. I do not now refer to the constitu- 

 tion of the board of management, of which, let me say, under some 

 important modifications, I incline to approve, although on that I reserve 

 myself. I speak of what the fund, however managed, is to be made 

 to do. The bill assumes, as it ought, to apply it "to increase and dif- 

 fuse knowledge among men." Well, how does it accomplish this 

 object? 



It proposes to do so, for substance, by establishing in this city a 

 school or college for the purpose of instructing its pupils in the appli- 

 cation of certain physical sciences to certain arts of life. The plan, if 

 adopted, founds a college in Washington to teach the scientific princi- 

 ples of certain useful arts. That is the whole of it. It appoints, on 

 permanent salaries, a professor of agriculture, horticulture, and rural 

 economy; a professor of natural history; a professor of chemistry; a 

 professor of geology; a professor of astronomy; a professor of archi- 

 tecture and domestic science, together with a fluctuating force of occa- 

 sional auxiliary lecturers; and all these professors and lecturers are 

 enjoined "to have special reference, in all their illustra'tions and instruc- 



