Fifty years in Wall Street
a million dollars to found and endow the Presbyterian Hospital at
Seventieth street and Madison avenue, and over a half million in
building the Lenox Library at Seventieth street and Fifth avenue.
The building and the library are both immense gifts, but admission to
the latter is so hampered by red tape, forms and ceremonies that it is
of little or no earthly use to the general public. As a piece of
architecture the building may, according to the ideas of the famous John
Buskin, help to educate the people, but in other respects they derive no
benefit from it. The library, which is built on ten city lots, contains
the choicest selection of books in the world, outside of the British
Museum, besides valuable manuscripts and works of art, and its
collection of American works is unsurpassed anywhere. That part of the
collection, consisting of Mr. Lenox’s own private library of 15,000
volumes, contains books of rare value, many of which could not be
duplicated. This is one reason why the general public are excluded.
In fact, there is a good deal to be said in favor of the fastidious care
that is taken of some libraries and picture galleries, as a large
portion of the general public don’t know how to appreciate their
privileges, and therefore abuse them, some through the relic monomania
and others actuated by pure mischief. Thus it was that Mr. William H.
Vanderbilt was very reluctantly obliged to exclude the general public
from his fine picture gallery, as certain visitors scratched the
etchings with their canes and put their fingers on the pictures, while
others were incessantly on the relic hunt and had to be carefully
watched during their visit.
PETER COOPER.
Peter Cooper was another of the philanthropists, with large means, who
sought to distribute a considerable part of it where it would do the
most good to humanity, especially to that portion of it who are in
pursuit of knowledge under difficulties. Mr. Cooper had a hard time of
it himself getting a fair education, and he knew how to appreciate the
boon. He was born in New York in 1791, and at the age of seventeen was
apprenticed to a coachmaker. He tried his hand at several other
occupations, was an inventor by nature, and the designer and builder of
the first locomotive in this country, which had its trial trip on a part
of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad.
Mr. Cooper experienced his great success in fortune building in the
manufacture of glue. He afterwards erected extensive iron works at
Baltimore, Maryland, and subsequently in Trenton, New Jersey. During his
life he built the Cooper Institute, at a cost of $650,000, with a
subsequent donation of $150,000. This institution is devoted to the
instruction and elevation of the working classes. It consists of a large
reading room and library and a public lecture hall. The building
occupies a small block at the junction of Third and Fourth avenues and
Eighth street. It has evening schools, attended by 2,000 pupils; a
school of design for females, in which there are 200; also, a school of
telegraphy for women, from which, in two years, over 300 operators have
been sent out.
The rents from the building on the lower floor and the offices defray
the greater portion of the expenses. Ample provision was made in Mr.
Cooper’s will for the permanence of the institution. During his life he
was a general donor to all kinds of charitable institutions, and almost
every variety of labor organization. He ran for President in 1876 on the
Greenback and Labor ticket, and was defeated by an overwhelming
majority. He had an idea that a large issue of greenbacks would create
universal prosperity and make everybody happy. He died in 1883, at the
age of ninety-two, leaving five or six million dollars, the greater
portion of which fell to his son and daughter, the latter being the wife
of Mayor Hewitt.
One of the greatest of American philanthropists, especially as his
princely bequest was rather unexpected, was the Hon. Samuel Jones
Tilden, whose financial and political career I have referred to in
another chapter. He was about seventy-three years of age at the time of
his death, in August, 1886.
Mr. Tilden died worth about five millions, four of which he left to be
donated to public and beneficent objects. The greater part of this is to
be spent in the erection and endowment of a grand free library, which,
if the terms of the bequest are properly administered, will be the
greatest institution of its kind in this country.
The disposition of the Vanderbilt fortune, up to the present time, has
been briefly described in the lives of the various members of the family
in another chapter. The Clinic of the College of Physicians, however,
which has recently been opened at Sixtieth street and Fourth avenue, is
entitled to greater detail, as it is, perhaps, destined at some future
day to become a great medical centre. Mrs. W. D. Sloane, daughter of Wm.
H. Vanderbilt, subscribed $250,000 to build the Maternity Hospital, in
connection with this institution, her father having, prior to that,
donated the balance of the million necessary to finish the entire
structure, which consists of the Clinic, the Maternity Hospital and the
College Hospital. It is said that in all their appointments the
different departments of this institution are superior to anything of a
similar description in the world.
Among the men who disposed of great fortunes I may mention James Lick,
of California, who devoted millions to charitable purposes; William W.
Corcoran of Washington, who gave two millions for an art gallery and a
home for old, decrepit and superannuated women; also, Mr. Stevens, of
Hoboken, who devised two millions, one for the Stevens Battery and the
other for the Stevens Institute at Hoboken. Miss Catharine Wolf, who
died last year worth twelve millions, bequeathed largely of her estate
to charitable purposes, and donated her magnificent art gallery to the
Metropolitan Museum of Art.
What a lesson is taught in these examples of philanthropic celebrities
to our fellow-beings—I was going to say fellow citizens, but that would
not be appropriate in many instances—the Socialists. Those millionaires,
who have all more or less been denounced as hard-hearted monopolists,
have been among the hardest workers and thinkers all their lives, many
of them denying themselves the luxuries and some of them even the full
necessities of life. For what purpose? Simply to be the hard worked and
poorly fed mediums of accumulating wealth to relieve the necessities and
minister to the comfort of the less fortunate, the idle, the dissipated,
the poor and the needy, and in general those who misunderstood and
abused them on account of their good work.
It was good for those benefactors of humanity that virtue is its own
reward.
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CHAPTER XLIX.
SOUTHERN AFFAIRS IN SPECULATION.
THE PRESERVATION OF THE UNION A GREAT BLESSING.—TO LET THEM “SECESH”
WOULD HAVE BEEN NATIONAL SUICIDE.—HOW IMMIGRATION HAS ASSISTED
NATIONAL PROSPERITY.—RESCUED FROM THE DYNASTIC OPPRESSION OF
EUROPEAN GOVERNMENTS.—SHOWING GOOD FELLOWSHIP TOWARDS THE SOUTHERN
PEOPLE AND AIDING THEM IN THEIR INTERNAL IMPROVEMENTS.—THE SOUTH,
IMMEDIATELY AFTER THE WAR, HAD GREATER ADVANTAGES THAN THE NORTH FOR
MAKING MATERIAL PROGRESS.—THE BUSINESS OF THE NORTH WAS
INFLATED.—THE STATES OF GEORGIA AND ALABAMA OFFERED INVITING FIELDS
FOR INVESTMENT.—ISSUING STATE SECURITIES, CHEATING AND
REPUDIATING.—PRESIDENT JOHNSON CHIEFLY TO BLAME FOR THE BREACH OF
FAITH WITH INVESTORS WHO WERE SWINDLED OUT OF THEIR MONEY.—REVENGE
AND AVARICE UNITE IN FINANCIAL REPUDIATION.
During the war I did all that lay in my humble power to farther the
cause of the Union, believing that it was a righteous one, and that the
North went into the struggle to maintain, uphold and preserve the best
form of government known to man, and certainly the only one suitable to
America.
View it as we may, the wisdom of man has yet evolved nothing to surpass
the Constitution of the United States. Whether Thomas Jefferson or
Thomas Paine was the author of its leading features, is a matter that I
shall not stop to discuss, but suffice it to say, that upon it has been
established the best government in the world. There is no other system
in ancient or modern history that could weld together and bring into the
social and political affinity of one great integral harmony the immense
variety and diversity of human elements that are dwelling as one large
and comparatively happy family in the United States.
What other system could combine so many nationalities, creeds, passions
and prejudices, modifying all of them and uniting all for the general
good and the perfection of a higher development of human nature in
political and social life?
There is none. We must go to the pleasanter pages of political fiction
to find a comparison.
This country has made greater strides in each decade towards the
possible approach of More’s Utopia or Plato’s Republic than any other
country has done in the same number of centuries.
It must be admitted that we are a considerable distance from the happy
goal contemplated by the writers named, but we are moving in the
direction to show that its attainment is possible. We shall yet
accomplish what the world has hitherto considered a pleasant fiction
overworked through the highest ideal of Greek art.
This high state of development is what we are coming to in spite of the
fact that the average ward politician has immense chasms to cross before
the hill tops of his evolution shall appear in sight. When he begins to
climb, however, his ascent will be marvellously rapid and he will leave
that vehement youth of Longfellow’s, whose watchword was Excelsior, far
in the distance. Moreover, his steps will be steady and prudent, and not
liable to unfortunate reaction or fatal mishap.
It has been said that revolutions never go backward. With much stronger
emphasis it may be asserted that evolutions in a Republic like those I
am now contemplating never recede, but still press forward and upward
towards the mark of a higher ideal.
A large proportion of the people who come here do so for the chief
purpose of getting away from other forms of government that are despotic
in their rule and oppressive to their subjects.
These people who come to us are saved and redeemed Their lives would
have been wasted if they had remained in the land of their birth. In
this country, they not only add to the wealth of the nation, but they
become useful members of the social fabric, with few exceptions,
enjoying happiness themselves and bringing up children, whom they teach
to admire, honor and revere the institutions of this country in contrast
with the land of their own nativity.
This country has thus become the asylum for the down-trodden of every
nation, and it is a great gainer by the contrast thus constantly
presented to the minds of those who come here. Our own people are also
in this way taught to appreciate their privileges and set a higher value
upon the advantages they enjoy.
If it were not for the constant stream of immigration to these shores,
the people of this country might begin to think that Republicanism was
the birthright of all, and forget that they enjoyed especial privileges
by birth, and came into this world with a very important start of other
nations. I fear that some of them are prone to imagine, especially some
of the fair sex, that we suffer here from that long felt want of a
hereditary and native nobility. Some of these fair ones have had sad