Brave Men and Women Part 31

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 tenth century before Christ, a type of our American philanthropist, Peter Cooper, in the nineteenth century after Christ. When I see Barzillai, from his wealthy country seat at Rogelim, 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, munic.i.p.al, 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 LL. D., 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 mult.i.tudes 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 Inst.i.tute, 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 Fourth Avenue and Seventh Street by Mr. Cooper, at an expense of $630,000, and endowed by him with $150,000, 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 Girard 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 Inst.i.tute, was as much as $3,000,000 or $5,000,000 now. But there are inst.i.tutions in our day that have cost many times more dollars in building and 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 inst.i.tutions.

This gave glorious suggestion to many whose large fortune was. .h.i.therto 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 ill.u.s.trious progenitor. Who can estimate the effect of such an inst.i.tution, standing for twenty-six years, saying to all the millions of people pa.s.sing 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 inst.i.tution has for twenty-six years been crying shame on miserliness and cupidity. That free reading-room has been the inspiration of five hundred 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 ante-mortem charity than post-mortem beneficence. Many people keep all their property for themselves till death, and then make good inst.i.tutions 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. Skinflints 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 inst.i.tutions, he had better bestow the gift before death, for the trouble is, if he leaves any large amount to Christian inst.i.tutions, 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 every one 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 $1,000,000, and heart enough to remember needy inst.i.tutions, 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 p.r.o.nounced a fit subject for a lunatic asylum. Be your own executor. Do not let the benevolent inst.i.tutions 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 eighty, for he stood in the perpetual sunshine of his beneficence.

I do not wonder that Peter Cooper, the modern Barzillai, lived to be ninety-two 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 ma.s.sacres more than a war. In contrast, behold the philanthropist in the nineties, and dying of a cold caught in going to look after the affairs of the inst.i.tution he himself founded, and which has now about two thousand five hundred persons a day in its reading-rooms and libraries, and two thousand 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 cla.s.ses, and the other the violent a.s.sault 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 Inst.i.tute. You never heard of any one searching the cellar of that man's house for a keg of dynamite. At times of public excitement, when prominent men had 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 ma.s.ses a.s.sembled in the hall of Cooper Inst.i.tute 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 ma.s.ses 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 can not do, and shot and sh.e.l.l can not do, and strongest laws severely executed can not do, and armies can not 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 seventy thousand dest.i.tute children in New York, and here I put up and endow out of my fortune a whole line of inst.i.tutions to take care of them; here are vast mult.i.tudes in filthy and unventilated tenement-houses, for whom I will build a whole block of residences at cheap rents; here are nations without Christ, and 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 a.s.sa.s.sination would go to 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 Wm. 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 nineteenth century shows us a more sensible way of monumental and epitaphal commemoration. It is natural to want to be remembered. It would not be a pleasant thought to us or to any one 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 $20,000,000, it would not so well commemorate him as that monument at the junction of Third and Fourth Avenues, New York. How few people would pa.s.s along the silent sepulcher as compared with those great numbers that will ebb and flow around Cooper Inst.i.tute 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 catafalque 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 builds her monument in the heavenly thrones of her converted scholars. Geo. Muller'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 which for 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 any one 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 G.o.d, 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 ninety-two 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-encompa.s.sing 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 ninety-two years compared with the years that open 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 G.o.d 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 set-back, but G.o.d 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 my recent visit, there has been a change for the better that amounts to a resurrection. The Chattahoochee is about to rival the Merrimac in manufactures, and the whole South is being filled with the dash of water-wheels and the rattle of spindles. Atlanta has already $6,000,000 invested in manufactures. The South has gone out of politics into business. The West, from its inexhaustible mines, is going to, disgorge silver and gold, and pour the treasure all over the nation. May G.o.d sanctify the coming prosperity of the people. The needs are as awful as the opulence is to be tremendous. In 1880 there were 5,000,000 people over ten years of age in the United States that could not read, and over 6,000,000 who could not write, and nearly 2,000,000 of the voters. We want 5,000 Cooper Inst.i.tutes and churches innumerable, and just one spiritual awakening, but that reaching from the St. Lawrence to Key West, and from Barnegat Light-house 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. TALMAGE.

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 brim-full, 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 thine own, 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.

x.x.xIX.

ILLUSIONS

"THEREFORE TRUST TO THY HEART, AND WHAT THE WORLD CALLS ILLUSIONS."--LONGFELLOW.

This curious sentence of Longfellow's deserves reading again. He is an earnest man, and does not mean to cheat us; he has done good work in the world by his poems and writings; he has backed up many, and lifted the hearts of many, by pure thought; he means what he says. Yet, what is altogether lighter than vanity? The human heart, answers the religionist. What is altogether deceitful upon the scales? The human heart. What is a Vanity Fair, a mob, a hubbub and babel of noises, to be avoided, shunned, hated? The world. And, lastly, what are our thoughts and struggles, vain ideas, and wishes? Vain, empty illusions, shadows, and lies. And yet this man, with the inspiration which G.o.d gives every true poet, tells us to trust to our _hearts_, and what the world calls _illusions_. And he is right.

Now there are, of course, various sorts of illusions. The world is itself illusive. None of us are exactly what we seem; and many of those things that we have the firmest faith in really do not exist. When the first philosopher declared that the world was round, and not a plane as flat and circular as a dinner-plate or a halfpenny, people laughed at him, and would have shut him up in a lunatic asylum. They said he had an "illusion;" but it was they who had it. He was so bold as to start the idea that we had people under us, and that the sun went to light them, and that they walked with their feet to our feet. So they do, we know well now; but the pope and cardinals would not have it, and so they met in solemn conclave, and ordered the philosopher's book to be burnt, and they would have burnt him, too, in their hardly logical way of saving souls, only he recanted, and, sorely against his will, said that it was all an "illusion." But the pope and his advisers had an illusion, too, which was, that dressing up men who did not believe in their faith, in garments on which flames and devils were represented--such a garment they called a _san benito_--and then burning them, was really something done for the glory of G.o.d. They called it with admirable satire an _auto da fe_ (an "act of faith"), and they really did believe--for many of the inquisitors were mistaken but tender men--that they did good by this; but surely now they have outgrown this illusion. How many of these have we yet to outgrow; how far are we off the true and liberal Christianity which is the ideal of the saint and sage; how ready are we still to persecute those who happen, by mere circ.u.mstances attending their birth and education, to differ from us!

The inner world of man, no less than the external world, is full of illusions. They arise from distorted vision, from a disorder of the senses, or from an error of judgment upon data correctly derived from their evidence. Under the influence of a predominant train of thought, an absorbing emotion, a person ready charged with an uncontrolled imagination will see, as Shakspeare has it--

"More devils than vast h.e.l.l can hold."

Half, if not all, of the ghost stories, which are equally dangerous and absorbing to youth, arise from illusion--there they have their foundation; but believers in them obstinately refuse to believe anything but that which their overcharged and predisposed imagination leads them to. Some of us walk about this world of ours--as if it were not of itself full enough of mystery--as ready to swallow any thing wonderful or horrible, as the country clown whom a conjurer will get upon his stage to play tricks with. Fooled by a redundant imagination, delighted to be tricked by her potency, we dream away, flattered by the idea that a supernatural messenger is sent to us, and to us alone. We all have our family ghosts, in whom we more than half believe. Each one of us has a mother or a wise aunt, or some female relation, who, at one period of her life, had a dream, difficult to be interpreted, and foreboding good or evil to a child of the house.

We are so grand, we men, "n.o.ble animals, great in our deaths and splendid even in our ashes," that we can not yield to a common fate without some overstrained and bombast conceit that the elements themselves give warning. Casca, in "Julius Caesar," rehea.r.s.es some few of the prodigies which predicted Caesar's death:

"A common slave (you know him well by sight) Held up his left hand, which did flame, and burn Like twenty torches join'd; and yet his hand, Not sensible of fire, remained unscorched....

And, yesterday, the bird of night did sit, Even at noon-day, upon the market-place, Hooting and shrieking. When these prodigies Do so conjointly meet, let not men say, '_These are their reasons--they are natural_; For, I believe, they are portentous things."

A great many others besides our good Casca believe in these portents and signs, and their dignity would be much hurt if they were persuaded that the world would go on just the same if they and their family were utterly extinct, and that no eclipse would happen to portend that calamity. In Ireland, in certain great families, a Banshee, or a _Benshee_, for they differ who spell it, sits and wails all night when the head of the family is about to stretch his feet towards the dim portals of the dead; and in England are many families who, by some unknown means, retain a ghost which walks up and down a terrace, as it did in that fanciful habitation of Sir Leicester Dedlock. In Scotland, they have amongst them prophetic shepherds, who, on the cold, misty mountain top, at eventide, shade their s.h.a.ggy eyebrows with their hands, and, peering into the twilight, see funerals pa.s.s by, and the decease of some neighbor portended by all the paraphernalia of death.

With us all these portents "live no longer in the faith of Reason;" we a.s.sert, in Casca's words, that "they are natural;" but we offend the credulous when we do so. "Illusions of the senses," says an acute writer, "are common in our appreciation of form, distance, color, and motion; and also from a lack of comprehension of the physical powers of Nature, in the production of images of distinct objects. A stick in the water appears bent or broken; the square tower at the distance looks round; distant objects appear to move when we are in motion; the heavenly bodies appear to revolve round the earth." And yet we know that all these appearances are mere illusions. At the top of a mountain in Ireland, with our back to the sun, we, two travelers, were looking at the smiling landscape gilded by the sunshine; suddenly a white cloud descended between us and the valley, and there upon it were our two shadows, distorted, gigantic, threatening or supplicatory, as we chose to move and make them. Here was an exactly similar apparition to the Specter of the Brocken. The untaught German taxed his wits to make the thing a ghost; but the philosopher took off his hat and bowed to it, and the shadow returned the salute; and so with the Fata Morgana, and the mirage. We now know that these things had no supernatural origin, but are simply due to the ordinary laws of atmospheric influence and light; so all our modern illusions are easily rectified by the judgment, and are fleeting and transitory in the minds of the sane.

But, beyond these, there are the illusions of which we first spoke, from which we would not willingly be awakened. The sick man in Horace, who fancied that he was always sitting at a play, and laughed and joked, or was amazed and wept as they do in a theater, rightly complained to his friends that they had killed him, not cured him, when they roused him from his state of hallucination. There are some illusions so beautiful, so healthful, and so pleasant, that we would that no harshness of this world's ways, no bitter experience, no sad reality, could awaken us from them. It is these, we fancy, that the poet tells us to trust to; such are the illusions--so-called by the world--to which we are always to give our faith. It will be well if we do so. Faith in man or woman is a comfortable creed; but you will scarcely find a man of thirty, or a woman either, who retains it. They will tell you bitterly "they have been so deceived!" One old gentleman we know, deceived, and ever again to be deceived, who is a prey to false friends, who lends his money without surety and gets robbed, who fell in love and was jilted, who has done much good and has been repaid with much evil. This man is much to be envied. He can, indeed, "trust in his heart and what the world calls illusions." To him the earth is yet green and fresh, the world smiling and good-humored, friends are fast and loving, woman a very well-spring of innocent and unbought love. The world thinks him an old simpleton; but he is wiser than the world. He is not to be scared by sad proverbs, nor frightened by dark sayings. An enviable man, he sits, in the evening of life, loving and trusting his fellow-men, and, from the mere freshness of his character, having many gathered round him whom he can still love and trust.

With another sort of philosophers all around is mere illusion, and the mind of man shall in no way be separated from it; from the beginning to the end it is all the same. Our organization, they would have us believe, creates most of our pleasure and our pain. Life is in itself an ecstasy. "Life is as sweet as nitrous oxide; and the fisherman, dripping all day over a cold pond, the switchman at the railway intersection, the farmer in the field, the negro in the rice-swamp, the fop in the street, the hunter in the woods, the barrister with the jury, the belle at the ball--all ascribe a certain pleasure to their employment which they themselves give to it. Health and appet.i.te impart the sweetness to sugar, bread, and meat." So fancy plays with us; but, while she tricks us, she blesses us. The mere prosaic man, who strips the tinsel from every thing, who sneers at a bridal and gladdens at a funeral; who tests every coin and every pleasure, and tells you that it has not the true ring; who checks capering Fancy and stops her caracoling by the whip of reality, is not to be envied. "In the life of the dreariest alderman, Fancy enters into all details, and colors them with a rosy hue," says Emerson. "He imitates the air and action of people whom he admires, and is raised in his own eyes.... In London, in Paris, in Boston, in San Francisco, the masquerade is at its height. n.o.body drops his domino. The chapter of fascinations is very long. Great is paint; nay, G.o.d is the painter; and we rightly accuse the critic who destroys too many illusions."

Happy are they with whom this domino is never completely dropped! Happy, thrice happy, they who believe, and still maintain that belief, like champion knights, against all comers, in honor, chast.i.ty, friendship, goodness, virtue, grat.i.tude. It is a long odds that the men who do not believe in these virtues have none themselves; for we speak from our hearts, and we tell of others that which we think of ourselves. The French, a mournful, sad, and unhappy nation--even at the bottom of all their external gaiety--have a sad word, a participle, _desillusionne_, disillusioned; and by it they mean one who has worn out all his youthful ideas, who has been behind the scenes, and has seen the bare walls of the theater, without the light and paint, and has watched the ugly actors and gaunt actresses by daylight. The taste of life is very bitter in the mouth of such a man; his joys are Dead Sea apples--dust and ashes in the mouths of those who bite them. No flowers spring up about his path; he is very melancholy and suspicious, very hard and incredulous; he has faith neither in the honesty of man nor in the purity of woman.

He is _desillusionne_--by far too wise to be taken in with painted toys.

Every one acts with self-interest! His doctor, his friend, or his valet will be sorry for his death merely from the amount of money interest that they have in his life. Bare and grim unto tears, even if he had any, is the life of such a man. With him, sadder than Lethe or the Styx, the river of time runs between stony banks, and, often a calm suicide, it bears him to the Morgue. Happier by far is he who, with whitened hair and wrinkled brow, sits crowned with the flowers of illusion; and who, with the ear of age, still remains a charmed listener to the songs which pleased his youth, trusting "his heart and what the world calls illusions."

XL.

PHILLIPS BROOKS