Excerpt from Address Delivered Before the Dialectic and Philanthropic Societies of the University of North Carolina: June 4th, 1856

I come too, my young '-: friends, to greet you with encourage ment and j oy - to assure you that you have a place in our hearts to welcome you to the duties, the destinies, and the blessings of active life and to hail in your coming the rising sun of our good State. I am here to testify the thankfulness of the land to your estimable Faculty, to congratulate their successful labors, to rejoice with you in their eminent qualifications, to wish them long contin ued honor and prosperity, and to express my sincere and fervent gratitude for their services to me and yet more for their fidelity to the Institution and their usefulness to the country. I come also with affectionate admiration to declare to our sister Societies the fond remembrance still cherished by their departed children, to tell them again of the just esteem in which they are universal ly held, to animate their noble efforts and to acknowledge their high claims among the literary institutions of the age. Let us hope that as the mild satellites of this larger luminary they may go on revolving in their placid spheres, and, like the beautiful badges you wear, may their memories ever shine on our bosoms as pure sou venirs of Virtue, golden lights of Science and bright stars of Liberty. And more than all, I come to represent the deep inter est, the high regard, the general attraction felt by the people to this illustrious College. Her auspic es are all bright. In her story we find nothing that we would alter - it is a shining record of virtue, patriotism and piety} Her future will be just to her past.

It will be read in the diffused knowledge, the enlightened sen ti. Ments, the moral habits, the just tastes the conservative principleso the free instituti dds, the patriotic sp1rit and the christian charac ter of the commonwealth. Nor will it end here. To-day six teen States are consulting the oracles of her wisdom and erudition and radiating from this source you may see broad beams and bright rays traversing and gladdening every segment of the national hori zon. And what North Carolinian's heart does not warm at the men tion of Chapel Hill Z Whose eye does not kindle at the thought of the University of his State? Who among us can look at the long roll of her distinguished sons, read the fair annals of her trials and her triumphs, behold her fame now spread upon the wings of the Eagle of America and remember that she is all our own, founded by our fathers, endowed by their love, sustained by their intelligence, the daughter of their hopes and the mother of our learning, and not feel proud of his State, proud of her University and proud of the great and good men who have left us the inheri tance? Let the University be our monument and our emblem. On the escutcheon of North Carolina, amid our armorial ensigns, side by side with the Goddess of the harvest fields, and the image of Liberty, let her lofty columns be placed, to remind those who behold that heraldric group, that all the arts are enlightened by science - that intelligence is the shield and the lamp of freedom that the temple of knowledge is the temple of power - and to show the world that a statue of true glory can be carved from the na tive marble of our virtues. And in all the fortunes of our State, may that figure fixed on her banner stand like the mother of Coriolanus at the gates of Rome, a moral wall between the am bitiou of her sons and the safety of her country.

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