menu_book Chapter 38

Chapter 38 of Brave Men and Women, Their Struggles, Failures, and Triumphs by Osgood E. Fuller. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Kristen Hand. Peter Cooper, born 1791, died 1883, the lesson of a long and useful life. Barzillai of Sacred History was a very old man, a very kind man, a very affectionate man, a very rich man of the 10th century before Christ, a type of our American philanthropist,

Peter Cooper, in the 19th century after Christ. When I see Barzilli, from his wealthy country seat at Rogolim, coming out to meet David's retreating army and providing them with flour and corn and mattresses, it makes me think of the hearty response of our modern philanthropist in time of trouble and disaster, whether individual, municipal, or national. The snow of his white locks has melted from our sight, and the benediction of his genial face has come to its long amen.

But his influence halted not a half second for his obsequies to finish, but goes right on without change, save that of augmentation. For in the great sum of a useful life, death is a multiplication instead of subtraction, and the tombstone, instead of being the goal of the race, is only the starting point. What means this rising up of all good men with hats off in reverence to one who never wielded a sword or delivered masterly oration or stood in senatorial place? Neither general nor lord

nor governor nor president. The LLD, which a university bestowed, did not stick to him. The word mister as a prefix, or the word esquire as a suffix, seemed a superfluity. He was, in all Christendom, plain Peter Cooper. Why then all the flags at half-mast, and the resolutions of common council, and the eulogium of legislatures, and the deep sighs from multitudes who have no adequate way to express

their bereavement? First, he was, in some respects, the father of American philanthropies. There have been far larger sums donated to the public since this man founded Cooper Institute, but I think that hundreds of the charities were born of his example. Sometimes a father will have a large family of children who grow up to be larger than himself.

When that six-storied Temple of Instruction was built on 4th Avenue and 7th Street by Mr. Cooper at an expense of $630,000 and endowed by him with $150,000, dollars. You must remember $100,000 was worth as much as $500,000 now, and that millionaires, who are so common now that you hardly stop to look at them, were a rare spectacle. Stephen Gerard and John Jacob Astor of the olden time would, in our day, almost excite the sympathy

of some of our railroad magnates. The nearly $800,000 which built and endowed Cooper Institute was as much as $3 million or $5 million now. But there are institutions in our day that have cost many times more dollars in building an endowment which have not accomplished more than a fraction of the good done by this munificence of 1857.

This gift brooded charities all over the land. This mothered educational institutions. This gave glorious suggestion to many whose large fortune was hitherto under the iron grasp of selfishness. If the ancestral line of many an asylum or infirmary or college or university were traced back far enough, you would learn that Peter Cooper was the illustrious progenitor. Who can estimate the effect of such an institution, standing for 26 years, saying to all the millions of people passing up and down the great thoroughfares,

I am here to bless and educate, without money and without price, all the struggling ones who come under my wings. That institution has, for 26 years, been crying shame on miserliness and cupidity. That free reading room has been the inspiration of 500 free reading rooms. Great Reservoir of American Beneficence. Again, Peter Cooper showed what a wise thing it is for a man to be his own executor.

How much better is antimortem charity than post-mortem beneficence? Many people keep all their property for themselves till death and then make good institutions in their legatees. They give up the money only because they have to. They would take it all with them if they only had three or four stout pockets in their shroud. Better late than never, but the reward shall not be as great as the reward of those who make charitable contribution while yet they have power to keep their money.

Charity in last will and testament seems sometimes to be only an attempt to bribe Charon, the ferryman, to land the boat in celestial rather than infernal regions. Mean as sin when they disembark from the banks of this world, they hope to be greeted as benefactors when they come up the beach on the other side. Skin flints when they die, they hope to have the reception of a George Peabody.

Besides that, how often donations by will and testament fail of their final destination? The surrogate's courts are filled with legal quarrels. If a philanthropist has any pride of intellect and desires to help Christian institutions, he had better bestow the gift before death. For the trouble is, if he leaves any large amount to Christian institutions,

the courts will be appealed to to prove he was crazy. They will bring witnesses to prove that for a long time he has been becoming imbecile. and as almost everyone of positive nature has idiosyncrasies these idiosyncrasies will be brought out on the trial and ventilated and enlarged and caricatured and the man who had mind enough to make one million dollars and hard enough to remember needy institutions will be

proved a fool if he have a second wife the children of the first wife will charge him with being unduly influenced many a man who when he made his will had more brain than all his household put together has been pronounced a fit subject for a lunatic asylum. Be your own executor. Do not let the benevolent institutions of the country get their chief advantage from your last sickness and death. How much better, like Peter Cooper, to walk through the halls you have built for others and see

the young men being educated by your beneficence and to get the sublime satisfaction of your own charities. I do not wonder that Barzillai, the wealthy Gileadite, lived to be 80, for he stood in the perpetual sunshine of his beneficence. I do not wonder that Peter Cooper, the modern Barzillai, lived to be 92 years of age, for he felt the healthful reaction of helping others. Doing good was one of the strongest reasons of his longevity. There is many a man with large

estate behind him who calls up his past dollars as a pack of hounds to go out and hunt up one more dollar before he dies. Away, away, the hunter and his hounds for that last dollar. Hotter and hotter the chase. Closer on the track and closer. Whip up and spur on the steed. The old man just ahead and all the pack of hounds close after him. Now they are coming in at the death, that last dollar only a short distance ahead. The old hunter, with panting breath and pale cheek and outstretched

arm, clutches for it as it turns on its track, but missing it keeps on till the exhausted dollar plunges into a hole and burrows and burrows deep, and the old hunter, with both hands, claws at the earth and claws deeper down till the burrowed embankment gives way and he rolls over into his own grave. We often talk of old misers. There are but few old misers. the most of them are comparatively young. Avarice massacres more than a war. In contrast,

behold the philanthropist in the 90s and dying of a cold caught in going to look after the affairs of the institution he himself founded and which has now about 2,500 persons a day in its reading rooms and libraries and 2,000 students in its evening schools. Again, Peter Cooper has shown the world a good way of settling the old quarrel between capital and labor, the altercation between rich and poor. There are two ways in which this conflict can never be settled. One is the violent

suppression of the laboring classes, and the other is the violent assault of the rich. This is getting to be the age of dynamite. Dynamite under the Kremlin, dynamite in proximity to Parliament House and Railroad Track, dynamite near Lordly Mansions, dynamite in Ireland, dynamite in England, dynamite in America. The rich are becoming more exclusive and the poor more irate. I prescribe for the cure of this mighty evil of the world a large allopathic

dose of Peter Cooperism. You never heard of dynamite in Cooper Institute. You never heard of anyone searching the cellar of that man's house for a keg of dynamite. At times of public excitement, when prominent men how their houses guarded, there were no sentinels needed at his door. The poorest man with a hod on his shoulder carrying brick up a wall begrudged not the philanthropist his carriage as he rode by. No one put the torch to Peter Cooper's glue factory.

When, on some great popular occasion, the masses assembled in the Hall of Cooper Institute and its founder came on the platform, there were many hard hands that clapped in vigorous applause. Let the rich stretch forth toward the great masses of England, Ireland, and America as generous and kind a hand as that of Peter Cooper, and the age of dynamite will end. What police cannot do, and shot and shell cannot do, the strongest laws severely executed cannot do, and armies cannot do,

will yet be accomplished by something that I see fit to baptize as Peter Cooperism. I hail the early twilight of that day when a man of millions shall come forth and say, There are 70,000 destitute children in New York, and here I put up and endow out of my fortune a whole line of institutions to take care of them. Here are vast multitudes in filthy and unventilated tenement houses, for whom I will build a

whole block of residences at cheap rents. Here are nations without Christ. I turn my fortune inside out to send them flaming evangels. There shall be no more hunger, and no more sickness, and no more ignorance. and no more crime if I can help it. That spirit among the opulent of this country and other

countries would stop contention, and the last incendiary's torch would be extinguished, and the last dagger of assassination would go slicing bread for poor children, and the last pound of dynamite that threatens death would go to work in quarries to blast foundation stones for asylums and universities and churches. May the spirit of Peter Cooper and William E. Dodge come down on all the bank stock and government securities and

railroad companies and great business houses of America. Again, this barzillai of the 19th century shows us a more sensible way of monumental and epitaphial commemoration. It is natural to want to be remembered. It would not be a pleasant thought to us or to anyone to feel that the moment you are out of the world, you would be forgotten. If the executors of Peter Cooper should build on his grave a monument that would cost 20 million dollars, it would not so well commemorate

him as that monument at the junction of 3rd and 4th Avenues, New York. How few people would pass along the silent sepulcher as compared with those great numbers that will ebb and flow around Cooper Institute in the ages to come. Of the tens of thousands to be educated there, will there be one so stupid as not to know who built it and what a great heart he had and how he struggled to achieve a fortune, but always mastered that fortune, and never allowed the fortune to master

him? What is a monument of Aberdeen granite beside a monument of intellect and souls? What is an epitaph of a few words cut by a sculptor's chisel beside the epitaph of coming generations and hundreds writing his praise? Beautiful and adorned beyond all the crypts and catacombs and shrines of the dead, but the superfluous and inexcusable expense of cataphalic and sarcophagus and tumulus and necropolis, the world over, put into practical help, would have

sent intelligence into every dark mind and provided a home for every wanderer. The pyramids of Egypt, elevated at vast expense, were the tombs of kings, their names now obliterated. But the monuments of good last forever. After old mortality has worn out his chisel in reviving the epitaphs on old tombstones. The names of those who have helped others will be held in everlasting remembrance. The fires of the Judgment Day will not crumble off one of the letters. The Sabbath school teacher

built her monument in the heavenly thrones of her converted scholars. George Mueller's monument is the orphan houses of England. Handel's monument was his Hallelujah Chorus. Peabody's monument, the library of his native village and the schools for educating the blacks in the South. They who give or pray for a church have their monument in all that sacred edifice ever accomplishes. John Jay had his monument in free America. Wilberforce his monument in the piled-up

chains of a demolished slave trade. Livingstone shall have his monument in regenerated Africa. Peter Cooper has his monument in all the philanthropies for which the last quarter of a century he encouraged by his one great practical effort for the education of the common people. That is a fame worth having. That is a style of immortality for which anyone without degradation may be ambitious. Fill all our cities with such monuments till the last cripple has his

limb straightened, and the last inebriate learns the luxury of cold water, and the last outcast comes home to his god, and the last abomination is extirpated, and paradise lost has become paradise regained. But notice also that the longest life path has a terminus. What a gauntlet to run, the accidents, the epidemics, the ailments of 92 years. It seemed as if this man would live on forever. His life reached from the administration of George Washington to that of President Arthur.

But the liberal hand is closed and the beaming eye is shut and the world-encompassing heart is still. When he was at my house, I felt I was entertaining a king, but the king is dead, and we learn that the largest volume of life has its last chapter, its last paragraph, and its last word. What are 92 years compared with the years that opened the first page of the future? For that, let us be ready. Christ came to reconstruct us for usefulness, happiness,

and heaven. I know not the minutiae of Peter Cooper's religious opinions. Some men are worse than their creed, and some are better. The grandest profession of Jesus Christ is a life devoted to the world's elevation and betterment. A man may have a membership in all the Orthodox churches in Christendom, and yet if he be mean and selfish and careless about the world's condition, he is no Christian. While on the other hand, though he may have many peculiarities of belief,

If he live for others more than for himself, he is Christ-like, and I think he must be a Christian. But let us remember that the greatest philanthropist of the ages was Jesus Christ, and the greatest charity ever known was that which gave not its dollars, but its blood, for the purchase of the world's deliverance. Standing in the shadow of Peter Cooper's death, I pray God that all the resources of America may be consecrated.

We are coming on to times of prosperity that this country never imagined. Perhaps here and there a few years of recoil or setback, but God only can estimate the wealth that is about to roll into the lap of this nation. Between five years ago when I visited the South and our recent visit, there has been a change for the better that amounts to a resurrection. The Chattahoochee is about to rival the Merrimack in manufacturers, and the whole South is being

filled with the dash of water wheels and the rattle of spindles. Atlanta has already $6 million dollars invested in manufacturers. The South has gone out of politics into business. The West, from its inexhaustible minds, is going to disgorge silver and gold and pour the treasure all over the nation. May God sanctify the coming prosperity of the people. The needs are as awful as the opulence is to be tremendous. In 1880, there were 5 million people over 10 years of age in the United

States that could not read, and over 6 million who could not write, and nearly 2 million of the voters. We want 5,000 Cooper Institutes and churches innumerable, and just one spiritual awakening, but that reaching from the St. Lawrence to Key West, and from Barnegat Lighthouse to the Golden Gate. We can all somewhere be felt in the undertaking. I like the sentiment and the rhythm of some anonymous poet who wrote, When I am dead and gone, and the mold upon my breast,

say not that he did well or ill, only he did his best. Dr. Talmadge Goodness. Goodness needs no lure, all compensations are in her enshrined. Whatever things are right and fair and pure, wealth of the heart and mind. Failure and success, the day and night of every life below are but the servants of her blessedness that come and spend and go. Life is her reward, a life brimful in every day's employ, of sunshine, inspiration,

every word, and syllable of joy. Heaven to thee is known, if goodness in the robes of common earth becomes a presence thou canst call thy known, to warm thy heart and hearth. Clothed in flesh and blood, she flits about me every blessed day. The incarnation of sweet womanhood and age brings no decay. End of chapter 38.