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ex-Mayor Thomas Carbery, which were read three times and passed.

The estate is estimated to have been two hundred thousand dollars. He gave $2,500 to each of his sisters, Ruth and Catherine, and the family residence. He made several minor charitable bequests. Of the balance of his estate he created a Charity Fund. He says: "This Charity Fund will be very large" and directs his executors to invest and dispose of for the benefit of the Saint Vincent's Orphan Asylum. The heirs thought that either charity begins nearer home or the beneficiary already enjoyed sufficiently his donations and they promptly instituted an Equity Cause (No. 37) for annulment. The Asylum promptly proposed an acceptable compromise. It took $15,000.

The Mayors of Washington, Carbery and the others, appear large men with small affairs. They with the means at hand were laying the foundations of a structure of world-wide admiration.

HISTORICAL SKETCH OF GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY, WASHINGTON, D. C.FORMERLY KNOWN AS COLUMBIAN UNIVERSITY AND COLUMBIAN COLLEGE, ACCOMPANIED BY A SKETCH OF THE LIVES OF

THE PRESIDENTS.

BY REAR ADMIRAL CHARLES HERBERT STOCKTON.

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(Read before the Society, April 20, 1915.)

The legislative acts concerned with the establishment of the seat of government of the District of Columbia consisted of the Act of the General Assembly of Maryland of December 22, 1788, and the Act of the General Assembly of Virginia of December 3, 1789, and the Act of the Congress of the United States of July 16, 1791, accepting grants of territory conveyed in the two acts of the General Assemblies of Maryland and Virginia just referred to.

Before the final acceptance by Congress of the grants of the two states of Maryland and Virginia and the final determination as to the seat of the general government, President Washington addressed Congress in 1790 in a message treating of the subject of a system of national education. Washington was impressed especially with the fact that the resort for higher education, as collegiate education was then called, to the English universities no longer met the needs of the new nation, and its democratic principles and society.

In his message he said:

"Whether this desirable object would be best promoted by offering aid to seminaries of learning already established, by

the institution of a national university, or by any other expedients, will be well worthy of a place in the deliberations of the legislature.

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The Commissioners of the District of Columbia on February 18, 1795, informed Washington in answer to his offer of a gift for a national university in his life time (which was similar to what he eventually left in his will), that subject to his approval they had chosen a site in the District for a national university. I might mention here that the par value of the fifty shares of the Potomac Company offered by Washington as a gift for this purpose were valued then at $22,200. The site referred to which met with Washington's approval was the one bounded by 23d and 25th Streets and E Street, N.W., the Potomac at that time forming the southern boundary. In after years this site was occupied by the Naval Observatory Buildings, and is now occupied by the Naval Medical School and its hospital and residences near by. This site had in the earliest days of the District been proposed as a site for a fort and barracks and used as a camp for troops afterwards and was known first as Peter's Hill after the well-known and still existing family of Peter of Georgetown and the District, and afterwards as Camp Hill. By the filling up of the flats of the Potomac its boundary has been extended to B Street and it now borders the Potomac Park and Speedway.

At a later date, near the close of his second term, Washington, more than ever convinced of the desirability of a national university as a means of higher education, made his last appeal to Congress, in which he said:

"Its desirableness has so constantly increased with every new view that I have taken of the subject, that I cannot omit the opportunity of, once for all, recalling your attention to it."

Among the expected advantages he suggests the following:

"The assimilation of the principles, opinions and manners of our countrymen, by the common education of a portion of our youth from every quarter. . . . The more homogeneous our citizens can be made in these particulars, the greater will be the prospect of permanent union.’

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As a testimony of his deep and growing interest in this enterprise he left at his death in December, 1799, this bequest in his last will and testament:

"I give the fifty shares which I hold in the Potomac Company towards the endowment of a University, to be established within the limits of the District of Columbia, under the auspices of the General Government, if that Government should incline to extend a fostering hand towards it."

President Jefferson, having views differing from those of Washington as to the power of Congress to provide for such general objects, commends, nevertheless, this recommendation of Washington in his message to Congress of December 2, 1806, urging it on their present consideration. President Madison early in his first term of office earnestly presented the same object in his message of December 5, 1810. He enlarges upon the reasons which prevailed with Washington in the following words:

"Such an institution, though local in its legal character, would be universal in its beneficial effects. By enlightening the opinions, by expanding the patriotism, and by assimilating the principles, the sentiments, and the manners of those who might resort to this temple of science, to be re-distributed in due time through every part of the community, sources of jealousy and prejudice would be diminished, the features of national character would be multiplied, and greater extent given to social harmony. But above all, a well constitute

seminary in the centre of the nation, is recommended by the consideration, that the additional instruction emanating from it, would contribute not less to strengthen the foundations, than to adorn the structure of our free and happy system of government."

At the close of the war in his message of December 5, 1815, President Madison returns to this subject and reiterates his appeal as follows:

"Such an institution claims the patronage of Congress as a monument of their solicitude for the advancement of knowledge, without which the blessings of liberty cannot be fully enjoyed, or long preserved; as a model, instructive in the formation of other seminaries; as a nursery of enlightened preceptors; and as a central resort of youth and genius from every part of their country, diffusing on their return, examples of those national feelings, those liberal sentiments, and those congenial manners which contribute cement to our Union, and strength to the great political fabric, of which that is the foundation."

From this it can be seen that the intention of Washington, Jefferson and Madison was not to establish an institution for narrow, isolated research, but to build first of all an institution from which graduates could go to every part of the Union prepared to engage in the ordinary professions and followings of life. So as citizen leaders in their communities they would diffuse the results of their enlightened education and in this way make more homogeneous the various communities of the country and assimilate by their patriotism all sections of the country and all of the newly arrived from other nationalities of the world which had been duly foresworn in their oath of allegiance and naturalization.

The long entertained opinions of such men could not have been hastily conceived and nothing but the differing views of the national Congress as to the power of

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