The History of Dartmouth College Part 17

"Annual Meeting, July 1863. Mr. Tuck offered the following, to wit: 'The undersigned has had his attention called to the accompanying resolutions pa.s.sed by the Merrimack County Conference of Congregational Churches, held on the 23d and 24th of June last; and he submits the same to the Trustees, with a motion that a Committee be appointed to report what action thereon ought to be taken.

"'1. "Resolved. That the people of New Hamps.h.i.+re have the strongest desire for the prosperity of Dartmouth College, and that they rejoice in the wide influence this n.o.ble inst.i.tution has exerted in the cause of education and religion.

"'2. "Resolved. That we cherish a sincere regard for its venerable president; for the rare qualifications he possesses for the high office he has so long and ably filled; but that we deeply regret that its welfare is greatly imperiled by the existence of a popular prejudice against it, arising from the publication and use of some of his peculiar views touching public affairs, tending to embarra.s.s our government in its present fearful struggle, and to encourage and strengthen the resistance of its enemies in arms.

"'3. "Resolved. That in our opinion it is the duty of the Trustees of the College to seriously inquire whether its interests do not demand a change in the presidency; and to act according to their judgment in the premises."'

"Whereupon, Messrs. Tuck, Bouton, and Eastman were appointed a Committee, to report on the subject aforesaid."

"The Committee to whom was referred the resolutions of the Merrimack County Conference, respecting Dartmouth College, made the following Report:

"'The Committee have taken into most respectful consideration the action of the Conference and the sentiment pervading the churches of which the resolutions of the Conference are the expression. We do not forget, but thankfully avow the debt of grat.i.tude which has rested on the college, throughout its history, to the churches of New England, and to the pious teachings and generous patronage of those included within their embrace. We are fully aware of the obligations of science and literature, in all past time, to the clerical profession; that the countenance and support of the clergy and the churches have ever been the chief reliance of this college, and that we can hope for little prosperity or usefulness to the inst.i.tution in future, without meriting the confidence bestowed upon it in the past. We deplore the present condition of the college in respect to the sentiments entertained towards it, as expressed in said resolutions, and we proffer our readiness to do any act which our intimate knowledge of its affairs and circ.u.mstances enable us to judge practicable and beneficial. Neither the Trustees nor the Faculty coincide with the president of the college in the views which he has published, touching slavery and the war; and it has been their hope that the college would not be adjudged a partisan inst.i.tution, by reason of such publications. It has been our purpose that no act of ours should contribute to such an impression upon the public mind, inviting the public as we do, to contribute to its support, and to partake of its privileges.

"'It would be impracticable if it were wise to embody in this report all the reasons which induce us to propose no action by which the removal of the president from the head of the inst.i.tution should be undertaken by the Trustees; and we bespeak with confidence the favorable judgment that we act discreetly, from the members of the Conference who have expressed in their resolutions their generous appreciation of the eminent ability and qualifications of the president for the position which he occupies.

"'Yet the Committee do not fail to see that the present crisis in the country is no ordinary conflict between opposing parties, but is a struggle between the government on one side, and its enemies on the other, and that in it are involved vital issues, not only respecting science and learning, virtue and religion, but also respecting all the social and civil blessings growing out of free inst.i.tutions.

"'The Committee recommend that the resolutions of the Merrimack County Conference, this report and the accompanying resolutions, be published in pamphlet forms, and that the Treasurer be directed to cause the same to be circulated among the members of said Conference, and other persons, according to his discretion.

Amos Tuck.

N. Bouton."

"'RESOLUTIONS.

"'The Trustees of Dartmouth College, impressed with the magnitude of the crisis now existing in public affairs, and with the vital consequences which the issue of current events will bring to the nation and the world; and, considering that it is the duty of literary inst.i.tutions and the men who control them to stand in no doubtful position when the Government of the country struggles for existence; inscribe upon their records, and promulgate the following Resolutions:

"'First. We recognize and acknowledge with grateful pride, the heroic sacrifices and valiant deeds of many of the sons of Dartmouth, in their endeavors to defend and sustain the Government against the present wicked and remorseless rebellion; and we announce to the living now on the battlefields, to the sick and the maimed in the hospitals and among their friends, and to the relatives of such of them as have fallen in defense of their country, that Dartmouth College rejoices to do them honor, and will inscribe their names and their brave deeds upon her enduring records.

"'Second. We commend the cause of our beloved country to all the Alumni of this Inst.i.tution; and we invoke from them, and pledge our own most efficient and cordial support, and that of Dartmouth College, to the Government, which is the only power by which the rebellion can be subdued. We hail with joy and with grateful acknowledgments to the G.o.d of our fathers, the cheering hope that the dark cloud which has heretofore obscured the vision and depressed the hearts of patriots and statesmen, in all attempts to scan the future, may in time disappear entirely from our horizon; and that American slavery, with all its sin and shame, and the alienations, jealousies, and hostilities between the people of different sections, of which it has been the fruitful source, may find its merited doom in the consequence of the war which it has evoked.

"'Third. The Trustees bespeak for the College in the future the same cordial support and patronage of the Clergy and Churches of New England, as well as other friends of sound learning, which they have given to it in time past, reminding them of the obligations which the cause of education, science, and religion seem to lay upon them, to stand by this venerable Inst.i.tution, in evil report and in good report, in view of its past history and great service to the Church and the State, entertaining an abiding faith that it will triumph over all obstacles, and go down to posterity with its powers of usefulness unimpaired.'

"It was moved by Dr. Barstow that the foregoing Report and Resolutions be accepted and adopted.

"On the question of adopting the report, two voted in the negative and five in the affirmative. On the adoption of the preamble and second resolution, two voted in the negative and five in the affirmative, for the first and third resolutions the vote was unanimous, so the report and resolutions were adopted.

"The president asked leave to withdraw for a short time, and Dr.

Barstow was requested to take the chair.

"The President on resuming the chair read to the Trustees the following paper, to wit:

"'Dartmouth College, July 24, 1863.

"'To the Trustees of Dartmouth College:

"'In making this communication to the Hon. and Rev. Board of Trustees I take the liberty respectfully to protest against their right to impose any religious, ethical, or political test upon any member of their own body or any member of the College Faculty, beyond what is recognized by the Charter of the inst.i.tution, or express statutes or stipulations conformed to that instrument, however urged or suggested, directly or indirectly, by individuals or public bodies a.s.suming to be as visitors of the college, or advisers of the Trustees.

"'The action of the Trustees, on certain resolutions of the Merrimack County Conference of Churches, virtually imposes such a test, inasmuch as it implicitly represents and censures me as having become injurious to the college, not on account of any official malfeasance or delinquency, for, on the contrary, its commendations of my personal and official character and conduct during my long term of service, far exceed my merits; but, for my opinions and publications on questions of Biblical ethics and interpretations, which are supposed by the Trustees to bear unfavorably upon one branch of the policy pursued by the present administration of the government of the country.

"'For my opinions and expressions of opinion on such subject, I hold myself responsible only to G.o.d, and the const.i.tutional tribunals of my country; inasmuch as they are not touched by the Charter of the college, or any express statutes or stipulations. And, while my unswerving loyalty to the government of my fathers, proved and tested by more than seventy years of devotion to its true and fundamental principles, cannot be permanently discredited by excited pa.s.sions of the hour, I do not feel obliged when its exercise is called in question, to surrender my moral and const.i.tutional right and Christian liberty, in this respect, nor to submit to any censure, nor consent to any conditions such as are implied in the aforesaid action of the Board; which action is made more impressive upon me, in view of the private communications of some of its members.

"'But not choosing to place myself in any unkind relations to a body having the responsible guardians.h.i.+p of the college, a body from which I have received so many tokens of confidence and regard, and believing it to be inconsistent with Christian charity and propriety to carry on my administration, while holding and expressing opinions injurious, as they imagine, to the interests of the college, and offensive to that party in the country which they [the majority] professedly represent, I hereby resign my office as president.

"'I also resign my office as Trustee. In taking leave of the college with which I have been connected, as Trustee or President, more than forty years, very happily to myself, and, as the Trustees have often given me to understand, not without benefit to the college, I beg leave to a.s.sure them that I shall ever entertain a grateful sense of the favorable consideration shown to me by themselves and their predecessors in office; and that I shall never cease to desire the peace and prosperity of the college, and that it may be kept true to the principles of its foundation.

I am very respectfully, "'Your ob't serv't, "'N. Lord.'"

"'Adjourned Meeting, September 21, 1863. Resolved, 'that in accepting the resignation of President Lord, we place on record a grateful sense of his services during the long period of his administration; and his kind and courteous treatment of the Board in all their intercourse.'"

Dr. Lord continued to reside at Hanover, cordially co-operating with his successor in office, till his death, September 9, 1870. His wife, Mrs. Elisabeth King (Leland) Lord, died a few months previous to her husband.

CHAPTER XVIII.

ADMINISTRATION OF PRESIDENT SMITH.

Rev. Asa D. Smith, D.D., of New York city, of the cla.s.s of 1830, was elected the seventh president of the college. His thorough understanding of the field upon which he was to enter is indicated by the following extracts from his inaugural address:

"There are four chief organic forces, by which, under the providence of G.o.d, humanity has its normal development. These, generalizing broadly, are the family, the school, the State, and the Church.

Wherever you find, even in its lowest measure, a true civilization, these exist; and as it rises they rise, sustaining to it the relation both of cause and effect. Concerning, as they do, one and the same complex nature, they have, in different degrees and combinations, the same underlying elements of power. In the family, we have, in its rudimental form, both teaching and government. It is a patriarchate--a little commonwealth; and to its head--a priest as well as a patriarch--that Scripture should ever be relevant, 'the church that is in thy house.' In the school, the simplest offshoot, perhaps, from a congeries of families, we have, or ought to have, the parental element; we have magistracy also, and a certain statehood; we have, or should have, wors.h.i.+p. The state, properly apprehended, is not only governmental but didactic--it is a teaching power; and though not, at this age of the world, theocratic, it should be, in a large view, religious. In the church, having specially and predominantly the last-named characteristic,--being of divine appointment, and as ministering to our imperative needs, the foster-mother of devotion,--we have, also, as essential to its purpose, both rule and instruction. And in the influence they wield, these great moulding agencies are perpetually interpenetrating and modifying each other.

"It is of the second of these, the school, that we are now called to speak. The service we essay is connected with an educational inst.i.tution, using the term in the specific sense; a fact, it may be said at the outset, which of itself dignifies the occasion. Not to insist on those affinities and mutual influences just adverted to, and of which there will be further occasion to speak, there is a view of education, a large and comprehensive one, which gives to it the very grandest elevation. It is the end, next to that which the good old Catechism makes chief, and subordinate to that, of all the divine provisions and arrangements. G.o.d is the great Educator of the universe. More glorious in his didactic offices is He than even in creation; nay, creation was for these. Earth is our training place--time is our curriculum; eternity will but furnish to the true pupil the higher forms of his limitless advancement. We have our lessons in all providence, in all beings and things, G.o.d teaching us in and through all. No mean vocation, then, is that of the earthly educator; no unimportant theme that now in hand. Yet even of the school in the more technical sense of the term, we cannot speak at large, except as in touching on any one department we more or less affect every other. Our thought may be fitly limited to that cla.s.s of inst.i.tutions which these ancient halls of learning and these inauguration solemnities naturally bring before us. The college is my subject, considered in its proper functions and characteristics.

"I use the term college in the American sense. This, not for the poor purpose of ministering to national vanity, but because we must needs take things as they are; and for the further reason that there is much to commend in the shape the inst.i.tution here a.s.sumes. It has hardly its prototype either in the Fatherland or on the Continent. It has but a partial resemblance either to the German Gymnasia or to the English preparatory schools, as of Eton and Rugby. As preliminary to professional study, it is in some respects far in advance of these. It differs materially, at once from the German and English University, and from the college as embraced in the latter. University education in Europe was once somewhat rigidly divided into two portions; the one designed to form the mind for whatever sphere of life; the other, the _Brodstudium_, as the Germans significantly term it, a course of training for some particular profession. Long ago, however, this division became mainly obsolete. 'On the continent,' said an eminent English scholar, some years since, 'the preparatory education has been dropped; among ourselves, the professional.' He speaks, of course, comparatively. So far as England is concerned, the same testimony is borne by a well-informed recent observer. This ancient and wise division is by us still maintained; with this peculiarity, that the 'preparatory' education, so-called,--by which is meant the highest form of it,--is the sole work of the colleges. Professional culture is remitted to other and often separate schools. The undergraduate course is for general training; it lays the foundation for whatever superstructure. It has no particular reference to any one pursuit; but, like the first part of the old University course, aims to fit the whole man for a man's work in any specific line either of study or of action.

"In this conception of the college, there are, it is believed, important advantages. It is better for preparatory education; it is better for professional. It felicitously discriminates. It keeps things in their place. It defines and duly magnifies each of the two great departments of the educational process. It is likelier to dig deep, and build on broad and solid rock; it tends to symmetry and finish in the superinc.u.mbent fabric.

"The college should be marked by a completeness. Rejecting the fragmentary and the unfinished, the well const.i.tuted mind ever craves this. Modern thought, especially, is pa.s.sing from an excessive nominalism to a more realistic habit; by many a broad induction, from mere details to a rounded whole: And nowhere more persistently than in relation to inst.i.tutions. The college should be complete as to its objective scheme. There may be onesidedness here. There may be, for example, an excessive or ill-directed pressing of utilities, as in the speculations of Mr. Herbert Spencer; or there may be an undue exaltation of what he calls 'the decorative element.' The theoretic maybe too exclusively pursued; or there may be a practicalness which has too little of theory, like a cone required to stand firm on its apex. There should be completeness, also, as touching the subjective aim. It should embrace, in a word, the whole man, and that not in his Edenic aspects alone, but as a fallen being. You may not overlook even the physical; the casket not merely, holding all the mental and moral treasures--the frame-work rather, to which by subtile ties the invisible machinery is linked, and which upholds it as it works. The world has yet to learn fully how dependent is the inner upon the outer man, and how greatly the highest achievements of scholars.h.i.+p are facilitated by proper hygienic conditions. As you pa.s.s to the intellectual, it matters little what cla.s.sification you adopt, whether with the author of the '_Novum Organum_,' in his 'Advancement of Learning,' you resolve all the powers into those of memory, imagination, and reason, or whether the minuter divisions of a more recent philosophy are preferred; only be sure that not a single faculty is overlooked or disparaged. Be it presentative, conservative, reproductive, representative, elaborative, regulative, or whatever the fine Hamiltonian a.n.a.lysis may suggest, give it its proper place and its proper scope.

"The college should be distinctly and eminently Christian. Not in the narrow, sectarian sense--that be far from us--but in the broadest evangelical view. Our course of thought culminates here; and here does all else that has been affirmed find its proper centre and unity.

Christianity is the great unity. In it, as was intimated at the outset, are all the chief elements of organic influence. It is itself the very acme of completeness, and it tends to all symmetry and finish. It is at once conservative and progressive, balancing perfectly the impelling and restraining forces; by a felicitous adjustment of the centripetal and centrifugal, ensuring to human nature its proper orbit. It is the golden girdle wherewith every inst.i.tution like this should bind her garments of strength and beauty about her.

"Were it needful to argue this point, we might put it on the most absolute grounds. All things are Christ's; all dominions, dignities, potences; it is especially meet that we say, to-day, all inst.i.tutions.

It is the grossest wrong practically to hold otherwise. It is loss, too, and nowhere more palpably than in the educational sphere. It is no cant saying to affirm, and that in a more than merely spiritual sense, that in Christ are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.' At his throne the lines of all science terminate; above all, the science that has man for its subject. Of all history, for example, rightly read, how is He the burden and the glory! Otherwise taken, it is a more than Cretan labyrinth. The Christian spirit, besides, raising the soul to the loftiest planes of thought, giving it the highest communions, bringing before it the grandest objects, and securing to all its machinery the most harmonious action, is eminently conducive to intellectual achievement. We have already said something like this as touching moral culture; but that, be it ever remembered, takes its proper form and direction only as it is vitally linked with Christianity. What G.o.d has joined together let not man put asunder.

Let the studies which we call moral, have all a Christian baptism; and, with all our getting, let us not stop short of the cardinal points of our most holy faith. Let the Will be still investigated, not as a brute force, or in a merely intellectual light, but in those high spiritual aspects in which our great New England metaphysician delighted to present it. Let Butler, with his curious trestle-work of a.n.a.logy, bridge, to the forming mind, the chasm between natural and revealed religion. Let the Christian Evidences be fully unfolded. We can hardly dispense with them in an age, when by means of 'Westminster Reviews,' and other subtle organs of infidelity, the old mode of a.s.sault being abandoned, a sapping and mining process is continually going forward. Let Ethical Science,--embracing in its wide sweep the Economy of Private Life, the Philosophy of Government, and Law, which 'hath its seat in the bosom of G.o.d,'--be all bathed in the light of Calvary. That light is its life. 'Let us with caution indulge the supposition,' said the Father of our country, 'that morality can be maintained without religion.' Let the Bible be included among our text-books as the sun is included in the solar system; and let all the rest revolve in planetary subjection about it. Let it be studied, not in a professional, much less in a partisan way; but with the conviction that it is indispensable to the broadest culture; that without theology we have but a straitened anthropology; that we see not nature aright, but as we look up through it to Nature's G.o.d. Be ours, in its largest significance, the sentiment so devoutly uttered by the old Hebrew bard: 'In Thy light shall we see light.' And let the discipline of college, so intimately connected with its prosperity, be fas.h.i.+oned on the model of the Gospel. Let it copy, in its way and measure, the wondrous harmonies of the redemptive scheme, in which 'mercy and truth are met together, righteousness and peace have kissed each other.' So shall it bless our halls with some faint reflection of the Divine fatherhood, and give to our society some happy resemblance to a Christian family."

A prominent feature of President Smith's administration was a greater utilization of the libraries, and the opening of a reading-room. The librarian says:

"The late Professor Alphaeus Crosby contributed considerably to the increase of the cla.s.sical books, and Hon. Nathan Crosby has recently furnished the means for commencing a collection of the works of Dartmouth alumni. It is intended to gather all books and pamphlets which have been written by graduates. The collection will also include matter relating to them and to the work of the college.

"In reviewing the history of the library their number is so great that it is impossible to mention even a small part of the benefactors; their best record is in the well filled shelves and the large amount of reading done in connection with the studies of the college course.

"One of the departments of the library consists of the books given by the late General Sylva.n.u.s Thayer, founder of the school of engineering, numbering 2,000 volumes.