Leonidas Polk Family Papers

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with the weak, his skill in administering a needed rebuke.

In the years from 1848 to 1854 came a succession of disasters which destroyed the Bishop's personal estate. The first to strike was cholera: the Bishop himself sickened of it, and on "Leighton" 100 slaves died of it. In 1850 a tornado struck and destroyed the sugar house, stables and cabins of the slaves. An early frost cut the sugar crop to a third of normal. The next year the Bishop's misplaced trust in a Tennessee friend ended in the loss of a large sum of money. During 1853 two of his own children died by yellow fever, and again the epidemic carried off a large number of his slaves. By the spring of 1854 he realized his debts had grown to the point where he would have to turn the plantation over to his creditors, and, to provide temporarily for his family, he would have to take the rectorship of a parish church. And yet it was precisely during these years that he was industriously planning his great project of a university for the Southern states that would rival the establishment at Harvard or Yale. Where,

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man and man, man and nature. As man's relations to God were the highest of which he could conceive; as all his knowledge came from God and all his truths, the truths concerning God and man were those which gave meaning and sequence to his knowledge.... The medieval university was rationally ordered, and, for its time, it was practically ordered, too. But these are other times; and we are trying to discover a rational and practical order for the higher learning of today."

More recently President Griswold of Yale has been laboring valiantly to shake this country out of the trance which blinds it to the needs of its educational system. With great energy and eloquence he has been elucidating "the irony of a situation that calls on higher education for the greatest effort in its history and at the same time places seemingly insurmountable objects in its way." Practically, President Griswold is concerned with the crisis in teacher-enlistment, owing to the failure of salaries to keep pace with the rising standard and cost of living. He realizes that the problem lies in the realm of personal