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PROCEEDINGS OF 
of never being used at all; and already has part of a generation of men been 
deprived of its benefits. If not beneath the dignity of the United States to accept 
the trust, the duty of executing it follows. That duty ought to be performed with 
reasonable promptitude. If nearly six years be not an ample allowance of time for 
the wisdom of a nation to determine what is to be done under such a will, the task 
of ever knowing seems discouraging. I say so with the greatest deference to other 
opinions, giving utterance only to my own; and having fully supposed, whilst 
pleading two years ago for bringing the fund into activity, that I was free then 
from the error of hasto. Acts of legislation upon momentous and complex sub¬ 
jects often pass within periods more circumscriced, without being chargeable with 
errors on this score. The most circumspect rule in legislation has seldom gone 
beyond the requisition to publish a bill one year, that it might be understandingly 
acted upon the next; and if there may be exceptions to this rule, it is not believed 
that the Smithsonian case forms one of them ; and, supposing that it did, more 
than double the time implied by such a rule has run out. 
Not to use this fund promptly, seems an unfit return for the comity of the tribunal 
that surrendered it up to us promptly; more promptly, it is believed, than was ever 
before known in the case of so large a sum once in the meshes of chancery. Whether 
this would have been done with a fore-knowledge of the delay already witnessed* 
can only be a subject of conjecture. Non-user works forfeiture as well as mis¬ 
use; and it is hardly perhaps an overstrained inference to say, that an anticipation 
of the former, such as has happened, might have forestalled the decree in our 
favor, in the unrestricted manner in which it was made. It is at least known that 
the English Court of Chancery is slow to part with trust funds under all ordinary 
circumstances, without full security that they will not be diverted from their object* 
or suffered to languish in neglect. That tribunal asked no such security from the. 
United States. It would have implied the possibility of laches in the high trustee.. 
Least of all could that suspicion have existed where the trust bespoke upon its face 
motives to exclude any other imagination than that of prompt performance. At 
that epoch our public faith stood in all things unsullied. This thought forces itself 
upon me. Would that I could drop it—would that it were not necessary to the 
pursuit of my subject ! 
But, painful is the consideration, that, in the more recent circumstances of our 
country, there exists cause for augumented sensibility at our apathy under this 
beneficent will. History may be seen as well as read. Ours, under some aspects 
at present, is indeed too painful. The charge upon us of dishonesty, has passed 
into wide belief, too wide to be effaced soon. To deny it will not efface it: we 
can only live it down. The impression has not been confined to any one nation 
among the great nations of the earth : it pervades entire and separate communities, 
whose united voices will go far towards making up the opinion of mankind. 
Affected by our intercourse, and smarting under losses, they have been little in¬ 
clined to discriminate between the demerit which denies just debts, and that which, 
after contracting them deliberately, utterly fails to pay them ; and this in times of 
peace and plenty, when the productive powers of our country are as great as ever, 
and all its industry in operation. In Holland, where sensitiveness to pecuniary 
honor is extreme, nothing excusing non-payment but insolvency brought on in ways 
free from all exceptions, and accompanied by surrender of every thing—in that 
old land of former commercial grandeur and constant probity, and in communi¬ 
ties adjacent, the taint upon our name is perhaps the deepest, though we may hear 
