layed, and to prepare the
audiences for the reception of our new and highly preposterous story.
[Applause.]

The kindness with which we have been received this evening emboldens me
to believe that perhaps you will not consider this explanation
altogether indecent or ill-timed. I have nothing more, gentlemen, to
say, except to thank you most heartily for the complimentary manner in
which you proposed our health, and to assure you that it is a compliment
which is to me personally as delightful as it is undeserved.
[Applause.]

DANIEL COIT GILMAN

THE ERA OF UNIVERSITIES

[Speech of Daniel C. Gilman, President of Johns Hopkins University at
the Harvard Alumni dinner, at Cambridge, Mass., June 29, 1881.]

MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN:--There are so many in this room to
whom this scene is familiar and so many whose voices have been heard
within these walls, that you can hardly understand how one feels who for
the first time stands and endeavors to make his voice reach over this
large assembly. It is not merely the sea of upturned faces, this noble
company of noblemen, this regiment of brigadiers, as it might be called,
it is not alone these pictures and busts, the devices and mottoes which
adorn this edifice, nor is it alone the recollection of all the
illustrious teachers who have been here brought together or the
consciousness that we stand among museums and cabinets and laboratories
unrivalled on this continent,--all this is noble and worthy of noble
men. But there is one thing that seems to me more impressive than all
this. It is the power which Harvard College has had throughout all the
land and throughout all its history. [Applause.]

I have had the opportunity of seeing on the shores of the Pacific how
every act of the corporation of Harvard College, every new measure
adopted by the faculty, every additional gift to its treasury, was
watched as men look toward the east and watch the rising sun, rejoicing
in its boundless store and radiant energy. [Applause.] And I have stood
on the shores of a Southern river and have seen the development of a
young college on the banks of the Patapsco, and I can truly say that if
there had not been a John Harvard, there never would have been a Johns
Hopkins [applause]; if there had never been a university in Cambridge,
there never would have been a university in Baltimore; and if there is
any merit in the plans adopted in that distant city, if there is any
hope to b