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" Being yourselves but trustees for diffusing knowledge among your 

 ' fellow men, and seeking nothing selfish, there could be no objection 

 ' to your asking Congress to invest you,' under its own guards and 

 ' sanctions, with the fund. By my estimate of duty, you owe it to 

 < science and your country to take that step on the broadest grounds of 

 1 utility to both. In your ministration, with the aid of so rich an in- 

 ' vestment, to the mental wants of the community, much might be 

 ' hoped from salutary influences in calming the too intense and exclu- 

 ' sive excitements at Washington, where only a slender population is 

 ' concentrated. By bringing to that seat of official power other excite- 

 ' ments in diversified objects of intellectual curiosity and attention, a 

 ' change might be witnessed that would act usefully upon the spirit of 



* legislation itself, producing good effects to the whole Union. These 

 1 are not irrational hopes. Knowledge is strengthened 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, 

 1 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 perma- 

 ' nency of the Union itself, by that community of mind and feeling 

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

 4 tropolis, will in time help to engender and diffuse." 



In his letter to the National Institute of November, 1840, Mr. Du- 

 ponceau recommends that association as a fit agent for carrying into 

 effect the objects of the Smithsonian Bequest in these terms : " I have 

 ' always been of opinion that it was such an institution as yours at the 

 ' seat of Government that Mr. Smithson had in view when he made 

 ' his munificent legacy to the United States. He could not mean, in 

 ' my opinion, that his money should be applied to the promotion of any 

 ' specific branch of knowledge, much less to the formation of a school 

 ( or academy. His views were more extensive. He wished to promote 

 ' science in all its branches and departments, and therefore he wished 

 1 his institution to be fixed at the seat of Government ; from whence, as 

 ' from a centre, the rays of science might be diffused throughout the 

 ' whole country. And, therefore, Congress cannot find a better oppor- 

 1 tunity to execute the will of that beneficent testator than by laying 

 ' hold of your institution and making it its own." 



