SECRETARY'S REPORT. 53 



secure tlie disposition of the scrip in that way. The governor 

 and council, in pursuance of the authority and duty imposed 

 upon them by the Act of the legislature, fixed upon eighty 

 cents an acre a^ the minimum price at which this land scrip 

 might be sold, and Judge French was appointed a commissioner, 

 under the Act, and authorized to sell the scrip, subject to the 

 minimum price of eighty cents an acre, under the general 

 supervision of a committee of two members of the council, if I 

 remember right, so that the details of the operation should be 

 always overlooked by some persons connected with the executive 

 government of the Commonwealth. Precisely how much has 

 been sold, I do not recollect ; but I think about 80,000 acres, at 

 a price of eighty cents an acre, or perhaps a trifle above. 



So, gentlemen, you see that when we are discussing this sub- 

 ject in view of what we would like to have, what we would 

 prefer, what we would advise, we are, perhaps, necessarily, a 

 renaote distance ofif from any substantially practical view which 

 it is possible for the trustees of the Agricultural College to take, 

 in administering the fund of the institution, under the Act of 

 the legislature. It has been the object, I believe, of the trustees, 

 to set the institution in motion as early as they conveniently 

 could do it ; still, it can never come to anything at all until the 

 whole or nearly all the land scrip shall have been disposed of ; 

 and at the present price of eighty cents an acre, it will only 

 afford a very meagre and beggarly fund from the income of 

 which to maintain an institution which shall be of any sort of 

 credit or usefulness to the Commonwealth ; and if any of the 

 trustees were influenced to vote in favor of establishing it in 

 the neighborhood of any other institution of learning, from 

 which they might hope to derive assistance, either by the aid of 

 its library, its laboratory, or the convenient contiguity of its 

 scientific professors, whom they might also employ to lecture, it 

 was probably owing to what they felt to be the exigent necessity 

 of the case, which admitted no alternative. If the people of 

 the Commonwealth who have a living interest, a personal 

 interest, they and their posterity, in such an institution, had 

 undertaken fo be liberal in a pecuniary way, as well as liberal 

 in their views concerning the organization and purposes of such 

 an institution, it might then have been put upon a basis entirely 

 independent of any suspicion, even, of a connection with any 



