Rules have been established--very proper and judicious rules for to-day.
But who knows that a hundred years hence they will be proper or
acceptable at all? They have also established a board of trustees,
ultimately to be reduced to twenty-five. These trustees have power to
perpetuate themselves. Who does not see that you have severed this
institution from the public sentiment of the city of Norwich, and that
ultimately that city will seek for itself what it needs; and that, a
hundred years hence, it will not consent to live, in the civilization of
that time, under the regulations which forty men have now established,
however wise the regulations may at the present moment be?
One hundred and fifty years ago, Thomas Hollis, of London, made a
bequest to the university at Cambridge, with a provision that on every
Thursday a professor should sit in his chair to answer questions in
polemic theology. All well enough then; but the public sentiment of
to-day will not carry it out.
So it may be with the school at Norwich a hundred years hence. The man
or state that sacrifices the living public judgment to the opinion of a
dead man, or a dead generation, makes a great mistake. We should never
substitute, beyond the power of revisal, the opinion of a past
generation for the opinion of a living generation. I trust to the living
men of to-day as to what is necessary to meet our existing wants, rather
than to the wisest men who lived in Greece or Rome.
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