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We bring our warmest greetings to you, our beloved Principal, Teachers and Matrons, and to you, our dear and kind Physician.

We have no words to express all we owe to you.

In your wise and gentle hands the cold charity of the world has been warmed into the melting tenderness of home and household. The God of the Fatherless alone can give you your wages.

Again, we greet all that are present here to-day, with the prayer that this day, so eagerly anticipated and so keenly enjoyed by us, may be to them, a day of mingled peace and blessing in all their happy homes.

It was at this Home that the orphan boy of Nayhingen found a sweet solace for the woe that had deprived him of a father's care and a mother's love, and it was here that the impress of manly virtues became fixed in his mind. Here it was that the foundation was laid upon which the youth and the young man afterwards erected the splendid superstructure of his character. Here that he found a friend in Mr. Thomas Bennett, who took him, at the age of eleven, into his own family, and became to him in every sense a foster-father. There is somewhat a parallel in the childhood life of Mr. Memminger and that of Sir Michael Faraday, the great English scientist and successor to Sir Humphrey Davy. Both of these eminent men were the recipients. of benefactions at an early age, and both were led to their benefactors by a chain of circumstances that I am not disposed to consider accidental. "There's a divinity that shapes our ends," says Shakespeare in Hamlet, who would thus account for the moral forces constantly at work in our humanity and inciting us to action. "There is a fatality in being," says another; and yet another, greater than all, whose teachings Mr. Memminger accepted in his mature. age, who assures us that even the "sparrows" have the supervising care of a great Creator who, in the appointments of his Providence, is not alone the Author, but who is the Director of all the issues of life. It is immaterial whether we accept the explanation of the one or the other, the fact still remains as a fact long observed that men often fail in

life with the most promising and propitious circumstances. investing them, while others, with none of these environments, appear to be Fortune's master and Fortune's favorites. Whether found "drawing at a well," or "grinding at a mill," the one is chosen and the other is left.

The reader will pray indulge me while I present another thought suggested by the study of these remarkable lives. Judicious labor and earnest zeal, the persistent purpose of a determined, positive nature, are the essential conditions on which one is permitted to receive the smiles of Fortune. "The gods help them who help themselves," is not alone a trite maxim, older than Æsop's philosophy, but quite as true as it is old. Those are most apt to succeed in life who deserve success, and to be deserving one must conform to the exacting conditions upon which bread was promised to our recreant parents in Paradise; he must learn to labor, to watch and wait. Nothing is or can be denied to well-directed labor, and nothing worth the having can be secured without it. Again, those men who have been the most useful in life, whether in Church or State, or in directing the industrial pursuits of society-who have left behind them a history that only brightens as the ages go by-are those who, in a slow and careful development of the powers of the mind and a uniform practice of the virtues of true manhood, have preserved their individuality, while they have adhered to the principles, recognised the precedents and profited by the experiences of those who had preceded them on the stage of life. It is not the most brilliant intellect that is the least erratic, nor is it he who has a birth-right that for this reason alone must become the great man and the good citizen. "Honor and shame from no conditions rise." It is a weakness of our humanity to regard what we are pleased to call misfortunes, and especially those which deprive us of wealth and the caste in which that possession sometimes expresses

its power, as being disgraceful and of necessity humiliating to the spirit of a proud man. While the possession of wealth brings a certain degree of independence, and may add dignity to the surroundings of those who properly use it, by no means does it follow that poverty is a badge of disgrace.

This is especially true with the young, who, though inconvenienced and often made to suffer through the improvidence or misfortunes of their parents, are yet without the experiences of turpitude, the essential precursor of disgrace. It is only a very vain and very weak person who would seek to hide away in oblivion or to obscure with falsehood an humble origin, or an association with those who had been the recipients of so noble a charity as that of the Charleston Orphan House.

I have taken up my pen to write the history of a great man, whose character and achievements are not dependent upon the suppression of a single fact of his history, as it cannot be added to by the mere platitudes of eulogy. Mr. Memminger, not even when he had acquired fortune, when his fame as a great lawyer was well secured, and his name had become a household word with the people of the Southern States-who delight to honor their statesmen-not only when as a Cabinet officer he sat at the Council Board of President Davis, recognised as his most trusted adviser, did he ever boast of, or in any manner deny, the fact of his orphanage or the benefaction he had received in his childhood. Whenever occasion required him to make reference to this period in his history, it was never that he did so with the boasting spirit of the so-called "self-made" man, nor was it with the mean evasion that the vain person alone evidences, but always with a manly frankness and a greatful sense of a kindness bestowed, that could but exalt him in the estimation of all right-thinking people. In after years, when as an alderman and a citizen of wealth and influence.

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