"Honorable Legislators,--The citizens of New Hampshire enjoy security and peace under your wise laws; prosperity in productive labors by means which you have adopted; and, by your counsels, increasing knowledge in the establishment of literature through the State. But, for none of these, can so much be ascribed to your attention as for Dartmouth College. By your patronage and munificence it was flourishing in former years; and so it still would have continued had the management of its concerns been adapted to answer the designs of your wisdom, and the hopes of its most enlightened and virtuous friends. "To your Honorable body, whose guardian care encircles the institutions of the State, it becomes incumbent on the citizens to make known any change in their condition and relations interesting to the public good. To you alone, whose power extends to correcting or reforming their abuses, ought he to apply when they cease to promote the end of their establishment, the social order and happiness. "Gladly would the offerer of this humble address, avoiding to trouble your counsels, have locked up his voice in perpetual silence, while the evils are rolling on and accumulating, were he not otherwise compelled by a sense of duty to your Legislature, and to the best interests of mankind, in the present and future times. "Will you permit him to suggest there is reason to fear that those who hold in trust the concerns of this seminary have forsaken its original principles and left the path of their predecessors. It is unnecessary to relate how the evil commenced in its embryo state; by what means and practices, they, thus deviating, have in recent years, with the same object in view, increased their number to a majority controlling the measures of the Board; but more important is it to lay before you that there are serious grounds to excite apprehensions of the great impropriety and dangerous tendency of their proceedings; reasons to believe that they have applied property to purposes wholly alien from the intentions of the donors, and under peculiar circumstances to excite regret; that they have in the series of their movements, to promote party views, transformed the moral and religions order of the institution, by depriving many of their innocent enjoyment of rights and privileges for which they had confided in their faith; that they have broken down the barriers and violated the Charter, by prostrating the rights with which it expressly invests the presidential office; that, to subserve their purposes, they have adopted improper methods in their appointments of executive officers, naturally tending to embarrass and obstruct the harmonious government and instruction of the seminary; that they have extended their powers, which the Charter confines to the college, to form connection with an academy[33] in exclusion of the other academies in the State, cementing an alliance with its overseers, and furnishing aid from the college treasury for