852 PROPOSED APPLICATIONS OF SMITHSON S BEQUEST. 



when that question will be decided. The director to preside 

 at these councils, at the meetings of the standing board of 

 visitors, and at all other meetings required by the business 

 of the institution ; and the secretary to keep the minutes. 

 The standing board of visitors to hold stated meetings twice 

 a year, and assemble on other occasions when they deem it 

 necessary. At the commencement of the institution, the 

 duties of librarian and treasurer to be united in the same 

 person. 



3. Lectureships to be established, comprehending as many 

 of the leading branches of physical and moral science as 

 the funds of the institution may be able to bear. Apparatus 

 to be provided for the branches requiring it. One of the 

 lectureships to be dedicated to government and public law. 

 When conflicting opinions on government are raging in the 

 world, to have the democratic principle, as modified by our 

 systems of representation, and the conjoint workings of the 

 federative and national principle, illustrated in elementary 

 disquisitions, apart from temporary topics and passions, is a 

 desideratum which the Smithsonian Institution might sup- 

 ply. Such productions seem due to mankind, as to our- 

 selves, imperfectly described as our institutions have been, 

 through adverse feelings in the writers ; it having generally 

 fared with us as the cause of Roman liberty fared in the hands 

 of royal historians. Rarely can foreigners, however enlight- 

 ened, be equal to the task of justly analyzing the complicated 

 movements, unintelligible to hasty observers, yet full of 

 harmony, that maintain the order, prosperity, and freedom, 

 of this great confederated republic, under guards combin- 

 ing the efficacy of popular sovereignty with its safety. 

 Authentic explanations of them, all issuing from this insti- 

 tution, at an age when steam is quickening all intercourse 

 throughout the world, would give new motives for listening 

 to^the doctrines and results of the democratic principle in 

 this hemisphere. So expounded, it would go before the 

 world without disparagement, and be fairly judged by its 

 results. Under public law, the tenets of America, now 

 locked up in diplomacy, or otherwise hidden or overlooked 

 in Europe, might^come into useful publicity ; her proposals 

 to Europe to abolish privateering, and prohibit, public ships 

 from capturing merchant vessels upon the ocean, thus for- 

 ever stripping war of more than half its evils upon that 

 element a stride in civilization to transcend, whenever it 

 may be made, the West India abolition act ; her resistance, 

 single-handed, against the enforcement of British municipal 

 law upon the ocean, as seen in the individual miseries and 



