the fund to me, as representing the United States, the master of the rolls said that he would pause upon his final decision until that petition was presented. It is thus that the case now stands. It will come on again one day next week, and I have every ground for believing that my next communication will inform you of a decree having passed declaring the United States entitled to the fund. Should the forms of chancery require any authentication of my power to receive the fund that Mr. Stevenson can give, he will be ready, at any moment, to give it, as he has assured me; and should his important aid be otherwise needed in anyway before the suit is closed, I shall not scruple to call upon him, knowing how zealously he would afford it. I have the honor to remain, with great respect, your obedient servant, RICHARD RUSH. The Hon. JOHN FORSYTH, Secretary of State. Richard Rush to John Forsyth. LONDON, May 12, 1838. SIR: I have great satisfaction in announcing to you, for the President's information, that the case came on to be heard again on the 9th instant, when a decree was solemnly pronounced, adjudging the Smithsonian bequest to the United States. Both my powers had been previously lodged with the court-not one only, as stated in newspaper reports of the case; and no question was raised as to my full authority to receive the money on behalf of the United States, without calling for any further authentication of my powers. The suit is therefore ended without fear of more delays; nothing but a few forms remaining to put me in actual possession of the fund. These, I have the hope, may be completed within the present month. The fund is invested in the stocks of this country, of which I shall, in due time, have an exact account. The largest portion is in the three per cent. annuities. The entire aggregate amounts to fully one hundred thousand pounds; and this, according to my present information, exclusive of about five thousand pounds to be reserved by the court to meet the annual charge in favor of Madame la Batut during her life; the sum producing it to revert to the United States when she dies. As soon as the decree is formally made up, the accountant general of the court will transfer all the stock to me, under its sanction, except the small sum to be reserved as above. Having no special instructions as to what I am to do with it, my present intention is to sell the whole, at the best time. and for the best prices to be commanded, and bring it over in gold for delivery to the Treasurer of the United States, in fulfilment of the trust with which I am charged. But I will reflect further upon the mode of bringing it home, and adopt that which, under all circumstances, may seem best. The result I announce will, I trust, justify, in the President's eyes, the determination I took to let the allowance made to Madame la Batut by the master's report stand without attempting to overset it, whatever might have been the prospect or assurance of ultimate success. The longer the suit lasted, the greater were the risks to which it was exposed. A large sum of money, the whole mentioned above, was to go out of the kingdom, unless an heir could be found to a wandering young Englishman, who had died in Italy at eight or nine and twenty,* and whose mother, never lawfully married, still lives in France. Here was basis enough for the artful and dishonest to fabricate stories of heirship, on allegations of this young Englishman having been married. That fact assumed, the main stumblingblock to their devices would have disappeared. Fabrications to this effect might have been made to wear the semblance of truth by offers in the market of perjury of Italy, France, and England-incidents like these being familiar to history, whether we take public annals, or those of families; and although the combinations, however craftily set on foot, might have been defeated in the end, it is easy to perceive that time and expense would have been required to defeat them. The possibility of their being formed (never to be regarded as very remote while the suit remained open) made it my first anxiety, as it was always my first duty, to have it decided as soon as possible, and to * Believed to be the age of Henry James Hungerford, though not found in the master's report. take care even that it moved on during its pendency with no more of publicity to its peculiar circumstances than could be avoided. I trust that both these feelings have been discernible in the general current of my letters to you, reporting all the steps I have taken in it from my first arrival. Need I add, as a further incentive to despatch, had further been wanting, that events bearing unfavorably upon the public affairs of this country, above all upon the harmony or stability of its foreign relations, would not have failed to operate inauspiciously upon the suit, if in nothing else, by causing stocks to fall. They did begin to fall on the first news of the rebellion in Canada, not recovering until the accounts of its suppression arrived. The case is now beyond the reach of accident, whether from political causes, or others inherent in its nature; and that its final decision thus early has been brought about by the course adopted in February, I am no longer permitted to doubt. Early may at first seem a word little applicable, after one entire year and the best part of a second have been devoted to getting the decision; but when the proverbial delays of chancery are considered, (and they could hardly have become a proverb without some foundation,) it may not, perhaps, be thought wholly out of place. Although neither the counsel nor solicitors gave their previous advice to the course, it being a point of conduct for my decision rather than of law for theirs, it is yet satisfactory to be able to state that they approved it afterwards. They regarded it as best consulting the interests of the United States, on every broad view of a case where a great moral object, higher than the pecuniary one, was at stake, enhancing the motives for rescuing it, at the earliest fit moment, from all the unavoidable risks and uncertainties of the future. A fortnight has not elapsed since it was said in the House of Commons by an able member that "a chancery suit was a thing that might begin with a man's life and its termination be his epitaph. On the whole, I ask leave to congratulate the President. and yourself on the result. A suit of higher interest and dignity has rarely, perhaps, been before the tribunals of a nation. If the trust created by the testator's will be successfully carried into effect by the enlightened legislation of Congress, benefits may flow to the United States and to the human family not easy to be estimated, because operating silently and gradually throughout time, yet operating not the less effectually. Not to speak of the inappreciable value of letters to individual and social man, the monuments which they raise to a nation's glory often last when others perish, and seem especially appropriate to the glory of a republic whose foundations are laid in the presumed intelligence of its citizens, and can only be strengthened and perpetuated as that improves. May I also claim to share in the pleasure that attends on relieved anxiety now that the suit is ended? I have made inquiries from time to time, in the hope of finding out something of the man, personally a stranger to our people, who has sought to benefit distant ages by founding, in the capital of the American Union, an institution (to describe it in his own simple and comprehensive language) FOR THE INCREASE AND DIFFUSION OF KNOWLEDGE AMONG MEN. I have not heard a great deal. What I have heard and may confide in amounts to this: That he was, in fact, the natural son of the Duke of Northumberland; that his mother was a Mrs. Macie, of an ancient family in Wiltshire of the name of Hungerford; that he was educated at Oxford, where he took an honorary degree in 1786; that he went under the name of James Lewis Macie until a few years after he had left the university, when he took that of Smithson, ever after signing only James Smithson, as in his will; that he does not appear to have had any fixed home, living in lodgings when in London, and occasionally staying a year or two at a time in cities on the continent, as Paris, Berlin, Florence, Genoa, at which last he died; and that the ample provision made for him by the Duke of Northumberland, with retired and simple habits, enabled him to accumulate the fortune which now passes to the United States. I have inquired if his political opinions or bias were supposed to be of a nature that led him to select the United States as the great trustee of his enlarged and philanthropic views. The reply has been, that his opinions, as far as known or inferred, were thought to favor monarchical rather than popular institutions; but that he interested himself little in questions of government, being devoted to science, and chiefly chemistry; that this had introduced him to the society of Cavendish, Wollaston, and others advantageously known to the Royal Society in London, of which body he was a member, and to the archives of which he made contributions; and that he also became acquainted, through his visits to the continent, with eminent chemists in France, Italy, and Germany. Finally, that he was a gentleman of feeble health, but always of courteous though reserved manners and conversation. Such I learn to have been some of the characteristics of the man whom generations to come may see cause to bless, and whose will may enrol his name with the benefactors of mankind. I have the honor to remain, with great respect, your obedient servant, RICHARD RUSH. The Hon. JOHN FORSYTH, Secretary of State. This cause coming on the 1st day of February, 1837, to be heard and debated before the right honorable the master of the rolls, in the presence of counsel learned on both sides, his lordship did order that the plaintiff's bill should be amended, by stating the act of Congress passed in the year 1836; and the said bill being amended in court accordingly, upon hearing the same act of Congress, and also the power of attorney granted to Richard Rush, Esq., mentioned in the said bill as amended, read, his lordship did order that it should be referred to the master to whom the cause of Hungerford vs. Drummond stood transferred, to carry on the account directed by the decree of the 15th day |