INTRODUCTORY NOTE.

The Inauguration of JOSEPH G. HOYT, LL. D., as Chancellor of Washington University, in the City of Saint Louis, took place in the Hall of the Mercantile Library, on Tuesday evening, October 4, 1859. A prayer, offered by the Rev. TRUMAN M. POST, D. D., commenced the services, after which the Rev. WM. G. ELIOT, D. D., President of the Board of Directors, made a statement explanatory of the progress and present condition of the University, and, in behalf of his associates, committed to the Chancellor elect the insignia of his office. The following Inaugural Address was then delivered.

ON THE

RELATION OF CULTURE AND KNOWLEDGE

IN A UNIVERSITY EDUCATION:

BY JOSEPH G. HOYT, LL. D.

IT is the tendency of human nature to adapt itself to the circumstances of its position. Society is the complex resultant, not only of antagonistic forces within itself, but also of a variety of influences constantly exerted from without. Let a civilized community be begirt with savage tribes, and its standard is gradually lowered, the line of demarcation grows fainter and fainter, until, at length, nearly all traces of high social and religious culture have disappeared.

The Dutch Boers, intelligent Protestant Calvinists, who began a settlement in Cape Town, South Africa, about the middle of the seventeenth century, have become, within the period of our own history, nomadic, lawless, sanguinary barbarians, hardly less wild and gross than their Hottentot neighbors. If, during the last few years, they have exhibited indications of improvement, it is because newly established commercial relations with the enlightened countries of Europe are producing the legitimate effect of a national regener

ation. But so late as 1820 there was not within their borders a school-house, or a book-store, or a newspaper. The women, descendants of the fairhaired daughters of German princes, were menial slaves, beasts of burden, whose characters were as low as the degrading services which they performed; and the whole colony, though still nominally christian, under the Synod of Dort, had descended to the level of brutal savages, a living illustration of the fact, that it takes only two centuries to change the high civilization of our boasted Anglo-Saxon race into unmitigated heathenism.*

Our New England colonies suffered a similar, though less striking, retrogression. The first settlers at Plymouth were, to a large extent, men of fine scholarship and polished manners, graduates of the English universities, skilled as civilians and courtiers, compatriots with Milton, Hampden and Cromwell. But they came into the wilderness, and, in accordance with the inexorable laws of our nature, were tempted of the devil. The restraints of civilized life, the thousand nameless influences of cultivated society, did not follow them. Their dress, manners, homes, soon began to partake of the coarseness of their rude exemplars. Refinement, sentiment, education, all languished in the shadows of the overhanging forests. In two or three generations, though the spirit of political and religious freedom was not extinguished, yet the whole aspect of the colony was changed. Instead of the scholarly culture, which had come,

*Horace Bushnell, D. D.-" Barbarism the first danger."