Page:History of the University of Pennsylvania - Montgomery (1900).djvu/142

138 of the Academy; and that in every Admission a regard will be had to the Priority of Application, without any View to Sect or Party.

It scarcely needed this affirmation to give the community the assurance that this very Catholic body of Trustees would countenance any favoritism in the admission of pupils according to the religious standing of the parent; but it is quite possible that the purchase of the New Building with a reference to a Creed in the conveyance, and that Creed being as duly formally recorded as was the conveyance, may have led the unfriendly and the unsympathising to raise doubts in the minds of their friends as to the very broad and liberal scope the Founder desired to give to its operations.

At the meeting of 27 July it was "Resolved that the English Master's salary be increased from the sum of one hundred pounds to one hundred and fifty;" but this is the first minute defining a salary, and the sum originally named must have been agreed to informally; perhaps thus early began those differences of opinion among the Trustees as to the proper eminence of English in the proposed curriculum which Franklin so stoutly contended for, not that it should take any precedence of the classics, but that it should be maintained with equal dignity through all the Academy course.

But it was not until the meeting on 10 November that the Trustees felt confidence in naming a time for the opening; their plans for a proper adaptation of the building to their purposes were to have been consummated for school uses in the usual Autumn term, but delays incident to such radical changes in construction as they found it necessary to make lost them these autumn months; not discouraged, however, they proposed to lose no longer time than was essential to the comfort of their teachers and scholars, and would begin in midwinter; and they ordered "That the Academy be opened on the Seventh day of January next, and the Rates of Learning and the opening be published in the Gazette a Fortnight hence." The Teachers were already under review, for we shall see that at their December meeting they were prepared to act and to create a faculty for the Academy. The public announcement of the opening is