Most of my readers are sufficiently familiar with the history of the State to be aware that, before the Revolution, the mother country would permit no college or university or school to be established but upon certain conditions utterly repugnant to principles of civil and religious liberty. The charter of Queen's College, at Charlotte, Mecklenburg county, (the college, town, and county, all three being named in loyal compliment to his queen,) was disallowed by George III., because other than members of the Established Church of England were appointed among the trustees. This act of tyranny did more to arouse the revolutionary spirit than the Stamp Act and all other causes combined. The money that belonged to the common-school fund was squandered by the mother country in the erection of a palace for the royal governor--the most splendid edifice of the time on the continent. And at the close of the war for independence, so impoverished was the country that the General Assembly could contribute nothing toward the establishment of the University, beyond endowing it with doubtful debts, escheats, and derelict property. So that if aid had not been given from private sources, it would never have struggled into existence. At the first meeting of the trustees, Colonel Benjamin Smith, the aide-de-camp of General Washington and subsequent Governor of the State, made a donation of twenty thousand acres of Chickasaw lands. Major Charles Girard, who had served throughout the perils of the war, childless in the providence of God, adopted the newly-born University, and bestowed on it property supposed to be equal in value to forty thousand dollars. General Thomas Person, the old chief of the Regulators, gave in cash ten hundred and twenty-five dollars[21] to the completion of one of the buildings; and Girard Hall, Person Hall, and Smith Hall, preserve in their names the grateful remembrance of the earliest and most munificent patrons of the institution. It is a striking evidence of the poverty of the times that the ladies of the chief city of North-Carolina were able to present only a quadrant in token of their interest in the new undertaking, and the ladies of Raleigh a small pair of globes.