Page:History of the University of Pennsylvania - Montgomery (1900).djvu/324

320 it * * * Party feeling had a great power in producing and fostering the nightly demonstrations which disturbed the more peaceful students and inhabitants of Cambridge and Oxford, at the beginning of the last century, and early in our own. 1

That a certain knowledge of cotemporary politics can be made a handmaid to Education, there can be no question, for the pupil in this can with the aid of his preceptor be led to juster and truer views of the former, than if he was shut out of all knowledge of civil movements around him and only turned into them without training when Education has set him nominally free from its bonds. The boys in the College and Academy were trained to loyalty; the Commencement of 1762 provided a Dialogue and Ode on the death of our late gracious Majesty George II; the Commencement of 1763 had a like exercise in honor of the happy accession and nuptials of our present gracious Majesty George III. But the controversies over the Stamp Act made loyalty to such a gracious sovereignty less palatable, patriotism became an element in the community, and its votaries were found in our College Halls in increasing numbers year by year. Smith, the author of the Dialogues of 1762 and 1763, could not sympathise in this patriotism as did Hopkinson the author of the Ode, who with his pen and good humor helped in the nationalising of his native land. Thus, in our narrative we cannot recite the work and influence of the remarkable curriculum alone, and note the happy results for learning and knowledge in its students which proved its excellence, without throwing upon it, and the men who employed it, those lights and shadows which the contemporary circumstances surrounding the new birth of a nation would naturally engender. In our case, this is imperative; for some of the Trustees and members of the Faculty were deep in the controversies of these years, and their personal influence must have been felt by the lads. Could it be a matter of little moment to any of these, that the Founder of their Home of learning was the foremost man of the day in all public affairs whether of politics or of philanthropy, and was in most of these years representing his 1 Sofia/ Life, pp. 5, 24, 25, 26, 27.