302 Southern Historical Society Papers.
They were foremost business and professional men. He was a scholar, but an eminently practical one. Education was his life work, the one absorbing object of his days and nights, and he was for fifteen years the inspiration that enabled the corporate power embodied in the board of administrators to move forward and upward, gaining new strength with every effort, and greatly increased power with every new success. Tulane, in growing great under the presidency of Colonel Johnston, had, obedient to his ideas, uplifted all the schools and academies of this section. The ambition of principals and assistants in private preparatory schools, is to have their pupils admitted to the freshman classes of Tulane and Newcomb without entrance examinations. The Boys' High School scholarship stimu- lates both students, pupils and teachers in that school. Tulane, throbbing with its own life and ambition, proved a vitalizing influ- ence throughout the entire educational system of New Orleans and the surrounding parishes, sometimes lifting up, sometimes helping to do so, never without some influence.
"The noblest profession a man can follow," Colonel Johnston used often say to his students, " is to educate others. It is not the most profitable financially, but it is the most gratifying in many respects. ' '
Ashley D. Hurt, a brilliant Greek scholar and a Greek poet, was placed in the Tulane faculty at the suggestion of Colonel Johnston, and Prof. Hurt's successor in the chair of Greek is a man, still young, whose education was received at Tulane, and whose scholastic attain- ments, especially in Greek, have attracted widespread attention. Tulane is sending out into the world many splendidly-equipped edu- cators, and they in turn send students to Tulane; and along the lines mapped out by Colonel Johnston, Tulane University works out its own destiny and that of a people.
An illustration of his devotion to the university, and also of his will-power, was given at the last commencement exercises. He had suffered much and had been under severe physical strain. He was at the time unfit to be on the platform, but it was commencement, and he must be where his heart was with his graduates. He could barely hold up during the exercises, and his condition was painfully apparent to the audience.
Glowing tributes to the memory of Colonel Johnston from Judge Charles E. Fenner, President of the Board of Administrators of Tu- lane University; the venerable man of God, Benjamin M. Palmer, D. D. , and others, have been published.
