he
honor of Philadelphia is involved in its faithful administration.
Philadelphia has a right to know how it is administered.

The President of the College is Major Richard Somers Smith, a graduate
of West Point, where he was afterwards a Professor. He has served with
distinction in the Army of the Potomac, in which he commanded a
brigade. To learn how to be an efficient President of Girard College
is itself a labor of years; and Major Smith is only in the second year
of his incumbency. The highest hopes are indulged, however, that under
his energetic rule, the College will become all that the public ought
to expect. He seems to have perceived at once the weak point of the
institution.

"I find in the College," he says in one of his monthly reports,

"a certain degree of impatience of study, an inertness, a
dragging along, an infection of 'young-Americanism,' a
disposition to flounder along through duties half done,
hurrying to reach--what is never attained--an 'easy
success'; and I observe that this state of things is
confined to the higher departments of study. In the
elementary departments there is life; but as soon as the boy
has acquired the rudiments of his English or common-school
education, he begins to chafe, and to feel that it Is time
for him to _go out_, and to make haste to 'finish (!) his
studies,'--which of course he does without much heart."

And again:---

"The 'poor white male orphan,' dwelling for eight or ten
years in comfort almost amounting to luxury, waited upon by
servants and machinery in nearly all his domestic
requirements, unused to labor, or laboring only
occasionally, with some reward in view in the form of extra
privileges, finds it hard to descend from his fancied
elevation to the lot of a simple apprentice; and his
disappointment is not soothed by the discovery that with all
his learning he has not learned wherewithal to give ready
satisfaction to his master."

It has been difficult, also, to induce the large manufacturers to take
apprentices; they are now accustomed to place boys at once upon the
footing of men, paying them such wages as they are worth. Men who
employ forty boys will not generally undertake the responsibilities
involved in receiving them as bound apprentices for a term of years.

To remedy all these evils, Major Smith proposes to add to the College
a Manua