THE NATIONAL INSTITUTION. 203 



ment, to the mental wants of the community, much might be lioped from salutary 

 influences in calming the too intense and exclusive excitements at Washington, 

 where only a slender population is concentrated. By bringing to that seat of offi- 

 cial power other excitements in diversified objects of intellectual curiosity and atten- 

 tion, a change might be witnessed that would act usefully upon the spirit of legis- 

 lation itself, producing good effects to the whole Union. These are not irrational 

 hopes. Knowledge is strengtliened by its alliance with power. Power is raised and 

 purified in its aims, and chastened in its exercise, by the influence of knowledge. 

 Every day's delay in improving the Smithsonian fund to its intended and stipulated 

 uses, is an injury to the present and future race of men. It is a wrong, silent in 

 its operation, but not the less a wrong. Let me even say that one of the incidental 

 uses of the fund, when in activity at the seat of Government, will be to shed a 

 benign aid towards the permanency of the Union itself, by that community of mind 

 and feeling which science and literature, well endowed and cultivated at the me- 

 tropolis, will in time help to engender and diffuse. 



Are not these high inducements to yoiu- application to Congress ; and ought they 

 not to create a reasonable confidence that the application would be favorably listened 

 to ? Else, why stand upon the merits of our political forms over old and hereditary 

 institutions ? Why think that ours rest upon right reason, the fruit of knowledge, 

 and theirs only upon show ? Why boast that ours appeal to the understanding, 

 which knowledge forms, and theirs to the senses ? 



Honored by having been chosen a corresponding member of yoUf Institution, my 

 only fear is lest this letter should be deemed presumptuous. But I take shelter 

 under the consciousness of a good motive. Perhaps, also, 1 may be at fault in 

 information touching what may already have been done in regard to the sugges- 

 tions I venture to offer. In any event, I will fain hope for their indulgent recep- 

 tion. One apology for the letter lies in the fact, tliat it was my lot to have been 

 the instrument, in the hands of the Government, of obtaining the Smithsonian fund 

 for the United States. This has naturally turned my thoughts to it anxiously, how- 

 ever inadequately. It was a spectacle as full of interest as it was novel, to see a 

 great nation a suitor before the tribunal of another great nation, where the issue 

 joined had exclusive relation to the interests of mind ; and it engaged, proportion- 

 ably, the thoughts and conversation of those who knew how to appreciate interests 

 80 transcendant. 



My next apology thence is, in the belief I entertain — with all deference to those 

 who think otherwise — a belief derived from intercourse at the Royal Society and 

 elsewhere, while in London on that eiTand, with those who were the friends and 

 associates of Mr. Smithson in his lifetime, (and among them I name the estimable 

 and enlightened Mr. Guillemard, once known as a commissioner in our country, 

 under the British treaty,) — that an institution like yours, in its main features, would 

 be the kind of one ho would himself have designated. Chemistry, of all the 

 sciences, was his favorite pursuit, as tiie archives of the Royal Society would attest ; 

 but the words of his will, catholic in their spirit and boundless in tlieir scope, in- 

 clude every thing. That the Court of Chancery in England would have affirmed 

 that will in behalf of a foreign nation, unless in full faith that its sole and grand 

 condition should be executed with reasonable diligence, is not to be supposed ; a 

 consideration to redouble all other motives that should now operate upon us, to 



No. 2. 18 



