Page images
PDF
EPUB

ADDRESSES.

VOL. II.

49

[ocr errors]

INAUGURAL ADDRESS.

Gentlemen, Trustees and Overseers; and Gentlemen, Professors and Tutors:

SUCCEEDING, in a highly responsible office, to a man unusually qualified for it by natural and acquired talents, and by the full possession of public confidence, it is impossible to conceal the anxiety with which I address you-an anxiety the more oppressive, as it operates on a system constitutionally feeble, and now scarcely recovered from wasting disease.

Speaking under these disadvantages, I solicit your favorable

attention.

The interest you have taken in the establishment and superintendence of this seminary demonstrates your conviction of the utility of public literary institutions. Any observations in proof of this point would be therefore superfluous.

It is well known to be an infelicity attending all human establishments that they are liable to perversion. That which is designed as a powerful instrument of good, may contribute to extensive ruin. The evil resulting from the abuse of power, is generally commensurate with the good which would be effected by a right use of it. Colleges afford no exception to these general remarks. Such has evidently been the judgment of all by whom they have been established or cherished.

Were indolence, for example, tolerated among youth who resort to public seminaries, the most inactive of our species would be allured thither; and if any of a different character should by chance, or the imprudence of their guardians, mingle with them, they would soon become assimilated to the general

mass.

Were no care exercised by the government of colleges, to preserve, or correct the morals of literary youth, there would be few conditions perhaps, in which the growth of moral depravity would be more rapid or more luxuriant. He whose vices are moderate in solitude, would become intolerable if connected with numbers, whose dispositions to offend were as great, and whose habits of offending were more inveterate than his own. Besides, learning gives power to its possessor; those persons, therefore, who become learned at the expense of moral principles and moral habits, acquire at once the ability and disposition to injure society.

To secure the benefits of literary establishments to the exclusion of their disadvantages, government has been instituted. It has not been thought sufficient, that the means of knowledge should be afforded, but that a disposition should likewise be cultivated to apply this knowledge to a right use. Without this colleges could not exist; or if they could, they ought not, as they would only be the instruments of arming the wicked to distress the good.

In this view of the subject, we clearly perceive the high value of good government; and we see that the object of such government always is, and always must be, to promote the literary and moral character of those who acknowledge it.

Laws, whether those of a college or of a civil community, should be few in number, easily understood, reasonable in themselves, and punctually executed. Laws which are not worth executing were never worth enacting; and when they exist, should be erased from the code to which they belong. If it be a known case, that some are violated with impunity, it is neither difficult nor unreasonable to presume the same of others; hence the authority of the whole becomes enfeebled; and for the same reason that laws should be repealed, rather than suffered to become obsolete, those which are designed for execution, should be executed with uniform punctuality. On entering college, a student does in fact, form a contract with the governors of the institution. They promise to instruct and guard him with parental

« PreviousContinue »