Nashville, her son’s home, had been chosen as the meeting-place by Mrs. Scott, because it was not so far south nor so hot as Montgomery, where she was then living.  Nevertheless in Tennessee the heat of the American summer was very trying, and the good people of the town further drew upon the too limited opportunities of their guest’s brief visit by sending a formal deputation to beg that he would either deliver an address, or be entertained at a public dinner, or “state his views”—­to an interviewer I suppose.  He could not well refuse one of the alternatives; and the greater part of one day was spent in preparing a short address on the geology of Tennessee, which was delivered on the evening of September 7.  He spoke for twenty minutes, but had scarcely any voice, which was not to be wondered at, as he was so tired that he had kept his room the whole day, while his wife received the endless string of callers.

The next day they returned to Cincinnati; and on the 9th went on to Baltimore, where they stayed with Mr. Garrett, then President of the Baltimore and Ohio railway.

The Johns Hopkins University at Baltimore, for which he was to deliver the opening address, had been instituted by its founder on a novel basis.  It was devoted to post-graduate study; the professors and lecturers received incomes entirely independent of the pupils they taught.  Men came to study for the sake of learning, not for the sake of passing some future examination.  The endowment was devoted in the first place to the furtherance of research; the erection of buildings was put into the background.] “It has been my fate,” [commented Huxley,] “to see great educational funds fossilise into mere bricks and mortar in the petrifying springs of architecture, with nothing left to work them.  A great warrior is said to have made a desert and called it peace.  Trustees have sometimes made a palace and called it a university.”

[Half the fortune of the founder had gone to this university; the other half to the foundation of a great and splendidly equipped hospital for Baltimore.  This was the reason why the discussion of medical training occupies fully half of the address upon the general principles of education, in which, indeed, lies the heart of his message to America, a message already delivered to the old country, but specially appropriate for the new nation developing so rapidly in size and physical resources.]

I cannot say that I am in the slightest degree impressed by your bigness or your material resources, as such.  Size is not grandeur, territory does not make a nation.  The great issue, about which hangs a true sublimity, and the terror of overhanging fate, is, what are you going to do with all these things?...

The one condition of success, your sole safeguard, is the moral worth and intellectual clearness of the individual citizen.  Education cannot give these, but it can cherish them and bring them to the front in whatever station of society they are to be found, and the universities ought to be and may be, the fortresses of the higher life of the nation.