Page:History of the University of Pennsylvania - Montgomery (1900).djvu/325

Rh adopted Province at the throne of power pleading for liberty? Could it be a matter of indifference to any that their Provost was taking his share in controversy whether public or anonymous? Would they not catch at least the echo of these influences? And may it not lie in such surroundings that the College and Academy turned into the arena of the Revolution more men in proportion to her graduates than any other Collegiate institution? If this was so, no regret can be felt at the exhibitions of partisan strife we shall witness as we proceed in the years whose records are yet to be studied. In this central Province of the colonies all the great movements of the time found their larger expression, and the College lads would have been cold indeed did their feelings not respond to the thought that they were waiting on the infancy of a great Nation, in whose future success they might have some share, whether more or less. Hopkinson who set his loyal Odes of 1762 and 1763 to his own music and sang them, was equally with Paca nurturing those greater principles which caused them to set their hands to a Declaration that loyalty to one's own country was the highest patriotism. Duche put his hands to the same plough, but looked back and was lost. Latta, and Magaw, and Morgan, and Williamson, were all true to the same pole. These were the farthest removed from the storm burst of 1775. But they, even from this distant point, attain a like degree in the work of their country's freedom with John Morris, Patrick Alison, Robert Goldsborough, Whitmel Hill, Thomas Mifflin, Richard Peters, Tench Tilghman, Alexander Wilcocks, Joseph Yeates, Jonathan Dickinson Sergeant, John Andrews, William White, Francis Johnston, Joshua Maddox Wallace, Benjamin Duffield, Henry Latimer, and others. Happily for their country, these men came to the struggle with minds trained in the best school for learning known in the colonies, and the record of such results should alone have saved it from the suspicions and the injustice of 1779; but, the party heat of that year having found its victim exhausted itself, and the successors of these partisans in a single decade made restitution and galvanized their victim into new life.