- ber of the secret committee of Congress which
really found the means of moral and material support for the war down to its close. He was chosen in the dark hours of November, 1776, to confer with Washington on the military crisis; he was a member, with Richard Henry Lee and John Adams, of the committee appointed that same winter to fire the drooping spirits of the rebels when Congress was driven from Philadelphia to Baltimore. He was a member, too, of the boards of war and finance, wrote state papers on the currency, and framed many of the most important bills passed by the Continental Congress. It was not unnatural that when, at the close of the war, Congress was terrified by unpaid and unruly Continentals battering at its doors in Philadelphia, it should seek refuge and council, as it did, in John Witherspoon's college.
Thus it happened that Nassau Hall became one of the hearthstones on which the fires of patriotism burned brightest. From 1766 to 1776 there were graduated two hundred and thirty young Americans. What their temper and feeling must have been may be judged from the names of those among them who afterwards became eminent in public life. Eph-
