Young gentlemen, foster-sons of the venerable institution near us! Some, if not all of you, are destined by your opportunities, and by bosoms glowing with honorable ambition, and beating high with the consciousness of talent, for a conspicuous part in the drama of life. Your eyes, doubtless, have already often glanced around, to see in what field you shall reap the harvest of wealth, respect, and fame, which hope represents as awaiting you. The buzz of notoriety, the palm of eloquence, the gorgeousness of office--those glittering bribes, which have lured onward their tens of thousands to mere splendid misery or to a shameful end after all--have, no doubt, displayed their attractions to you: but permit me to suggest, that if you will devote the powers with which nature and education have gifted you, to the patriot task of purifying and expanding the minds of your countrymen--besides enjoying in your latter days that sweetest of earthly thoughts, the thought of a life spent in usefulness--you may have gathered laurels of glory, compared with which, all the chaplets ever won in the tilt-yard of vulgar ambition are paltry weeds. My wealthy fellow citizens! remember, that where {24} suffrage is nearly universal and the majority rules, if the great body of the people be ignorant or immoral, property is never secure from assaults, under the disguise of law: either agrarian schemes, or oppressive protecting systems, or advantages to certain classes, or some form of unequal taxation; all, the result of ill-informed minds, or of depraved dispositions. And if lawlessness assume not the garb of legislation, still it is always banded with ignorance in the firing of barns, the destruction of labor-saving machinery,[19] conspiracies to raise wages, and all the terrific outrages that spring from the fury of mobs. Thus, by a wise Providence, are you, who are the most _able_ to promote the education of the people, also by far the most _interested_ in doing so. If there can be a case, in which a judicious liberality is the truest economy, that case is now yours: and never may the _ill husbandry of niggardliness_ be more awfully exemplified, than by your grudging a small particle of your wealth, to place the remainder beyond the reach of this peril. [Footnote 19: No one can have forgotten the ravages committed, a year or two since, by the ignorant poor of Kent, and some others of the southern and middle counties of England, chiefly under the delusive idea, that their sufferings were caused by labor-saving machinery.]