This act initiates a radical change in the organization of this University. It establishes for one of its legislative Houses a new electorate. The State hereby discharges itself of all active participation in the conduct of the College, and devolves on the body of the Alumni responsibilities assumed in former enactments extending through a period of more than two hundred years. The wisdom or justice of this measure I am not inclined to discuss. Certainly there is nothing in the history of past relations between the Commonwealth and the University that should make us regret the change. That history has not been one of mere benefactions on one side, and pure indebtedness on the other. Whatever the University may owe to the State, the balance of obligation falls heavily on the other side. In the days of Provincial rule the Colony of Massachusetts Bay appears to have exhausted its zeal for collegiate education in the much-lauded promissory act by which the General Court, in 1636, "agree to give four hundred pounds towards a school or college, whereof two hundred pounds shall be paid next year." The promise was not fulfilled, and the record of those years leaves it doubtful whether legislative action alone would during that or the next generation have accomplished the work, had not a graduate of Emanuel College in English Cambridge, who seems providentially enough to have dropped on these shores, where he lived but a year, for that express purpose, supplied the requisite funds. The College once started and got under way, the fathers of the Province assumed a vigilant oversight of its orthodoxy, but discharged with a lax and grudging service the responsibility of its maintenance. They ejected the first President, the protomartyr of American learning, the man who sacrificed more to the College than any one individual in the whole course of its history, on account of certain scruples about infant baptism, of which, in the language of the time, "it was not hard to discover that they came from the Evil One," and for which poor Dunster was indicted by the grand-jury, sentenced to a public admonition, and laid under bonds for good behavior. They starved the second President for eighteen years on a salary payable in Indian corn; and in answer to his earnest prayer for relief, alleging instant necessity, the sacrifice of personal property, and the custom of English universities, a committee of the General Court reported that "they conceive the country to have done honorably toward the petitioner, and that his parity with English colleges is not pertinent." The third President, by their connivance and co-operation, was sacrificed to the machinations of the students, egged on, it is thought, by members of the Corporation, and died, "as was said, with a broken heart."