ADDRESS. 97 
rest the future reputation and prosperity of this Institution. 
When some of us who are now present, were engaged in 
founding the College of Pharmacy, we were told hy many 
who refused to join us, that we were raising up a set of young 
men to take the business out of our hands. I told them that 
I did not fear the result; that we would educate a race of 
young men better instructed than ourselves, and that if we 
should be forced by their competition to reform our own 
shops and to review our old studies, both we and the commu- 
nity would be the gainers. I am sure that I was right in my 
opinion, and that a confidence in sound first principles did 
not on this occasion lead into any error. 
Our College has succeeded beyond our most sanguine hopes. 
Its eleves are at this moment among the most enterprising and 
the best instructed members of their profession, and, unless 
they and unless you fail in your duty to yourselves and to the 
community, the reputation of our College and of its members 
will go on increasing. It is as true in the present case as it 
is in the broad and general application to society at large, that 
the existing generation is but the tenant for life of a patrimony 
which it is bound by the most sacred obligations, to use and 
to cultivate, and which it has neither a legal nor a moral 
right to neglect or to destroy. The Institutions of a com- 
munity — its foundations of charity and the arts — of literature 
and religion, form the rightful inheritance of each succeeding 
generation, and woe to that nation which tramples upon or 
perverts them. 
Take away from our own happy Philadelphia her literary 
associations, her institutions of charity and benevolence, which 
infuse into her citizens that calmness and steadiness of charac- 
ter that are so strongly marked as to assimilate to their own 
nature the multitudes of all nations, that an unrivalled pros- 
perity attracts to her door; take away these and their influ- 
ence, and we should no longer be able to recognise the features 
to which our afiections cling with an attachment as strong as 
that of the Switzer to his Alpine vallies. Let me beseech 
you, young men, never to forget that the theatre of action 
VOL. III. NO. II. 13 
