THE NATIONAL INSTITUTION. 
203 
ment, to the mental wants of the community, much might be hoped 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- 
eial 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 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, 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 your 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 your 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, I 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, that 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 
so 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 errand, 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 he would himself have designated. Chemistry, of all the 
sciences, was his favorite pursuit, as the archives of the Royal Society would attest; 
but the words of his will, catholic in their spirit and boundless in their 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 
