industrious and the ambitious. It was inspiring to live in such a country at such a time; it was likewise a propitious time for a college to begin a long and useful period of service.

“What’s in a name?” Shakespeare has one of his characters ask, suggesting that a rose would smell as sweet by any other name. On the contrary, a name bestowed upon a person or institution, when its significance is rightly understood, becomes an important factor in the development of character and individuality. What a wonderful asset there is in the name of Washington and Lee University, bearing the names of two of the greatest men born on this continent! No other American college has such a heritage. Burritt College, however, is among those appropriately and honorably named.

In 1848, Elihu Burritt, for whom the college was named, had for several years been widely known as “The Learned Blacksmith.” By the time he was thirty he was able to read more or less fluently about fifty different languages. At his native town, New Britain, Connecticut, while he was working the hand-bellows to heat a piece of metal in his blacksmith shop, he studied from a book conveniently propped open. This is the reason the seal of Burritt College portrays a blacksmith at work at his anvil. Figuratively, Elihu Burritt had many irons in the fire. In 1848, he was the publisher of a weekly paper in Worcester, Massachusetts, called “The Christian Citizen,” which was devoted to anti-slavery, temperance, peace, and self-culture. It was the first publication of its kind in America to give definite space to the cause of peace. In England in 1846, he drafted the plan for a society called “The League of Universal Brotherhood.” When this college at Spencer was given his name in 1848, Burritt was in Brussels, Belgium, attending a congress of this “Brotherhood,” where he presented a plan for “A Congress of Nations, for the purpose of establishing a well-defined code of international law, and a high court of adjudication to interpret and apply it, in the settlement of all international disputes, which cannot be satisfactorily arranged by negotiation.” Accordingly, Burritt had the vision of what Tennyson some years later prophetically called, in his “Locksley Hall,” “The parliament of men, the federation of the world.” This was nearly a hundred years before the League of Nations, and the United Nations of our time.

Burritt began to lecture when about thirty, his first subject being “Application and Genius,” in which he sought to prove that what was generally thought to be genius was not something peculiar and native but merely the result of long and persistent application. Though he had an international reputation, he was devoted to his native town and the friends of his youth. In the nineteenth provision of his will, he wrote: “Having thus disposed of the property which a kind Providence has put in my possession, in a way which I hope may testify my gratitude for such a gift, I bequeath to this my native town the undying affection of a son who held its esteem and special tokens of consideration above all the honors which he received elsewhere.” I believe you will agree with me when I declare that we have reason to be proud of the name of Burritt College, given in honor of such a scholar and generous-hearted idealist. In one way or another, his ideals became the ideals of the college bearing his name,—true scholarship, the dignity of labor, and service for humanity.

The charter for Burritt College was secured by a board of thirteen trustees. They apparently were not superstitious regarding the number thirteen in those days. This board, of which John Gillentine was the chairman, obtained money for the erection of a college building from citizens of White, Warren, and Van Buren Counties and probably elsewhere. Nathan Trogdon was employed as contractor and builder. The building, a two-story brick