In January, 1848, peace was signed ending our war with Mexico. Also in January, gold was discovered near Sutter’s Fort in California. Oregon was organized as a free territory in August, and Wisconsin was admitted that year as the thirtieth state. At that time the only states west of the Mississippi River were Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri, and Iowa. That year Zachary Taylor was elected President of the United States. In Europe, 1848 was a year of political upheaval. There were revolutions in Austria, Prussia, Hungary, Spain, and Italy. In France, King Louis Philippe fled and Louis Napoleon became President of the Second Republic. Europe was in ferment then as now, one hundred years later; but then the United States was guided by the Monroe Doctrine, only recently promulgated, and was not burdened, like Atlas, with the world on its shoulders, as it is today. In American literature, 1848 was the year in which Edgar Allen Poe ended his unhappy life; the year in which Emerson, Lowell, Irving, Longfellow, Parkman, Thoreau, and Whittier all published books. The following year appeared Hawthorne’s _Scarlet Letter_. In England, Dickens, Thackeray, Browning, Tennyson, Macaulay, Matthew Arnold, and Carlyle were flourishing, Thackeray’s _Vanity Fair_ being published the year before 1848 and Dickens’ _David Copperfield_ the year following. In the United States the year 1848 was a time of comparative peace and security, of bright hope and golden promise, with land for all who wished it, work and opportunity for the industrious and the ambitious. It was inspiring to live in such a country at such a time; it was likewise a propitious time for a college to begin a long and useful period of service. “What’s in a name?” Shakespeare has one of his characters ask, suggesting that a rose would smell as sweet by any other name. On the contrary, a name bestowed upon a person or institution, when its significance is rightly understood, becomes an important factor in the development of character and individuality. What a wonderful asset there is in the name of Washington and Lee University, bearing the names of two of the greatest men born on this continent! No other American college has such a heritage. Burritt College, however, is among those appropriately and honorably named.