American Men of Mind Part 15

Peter Cooper lived to see the inst.i.tution which he had founded realize at least some of his hopes for it. He himself lived a most active life, taking a prominent part in many movements looking to the reform of national or civic abuses. In 1876, he was nominated by the national independent party as their candidate for president and received nearly a hundred thousand votes. Since his death, the inst.i.tution which he founded has grown steadily in importance; other bequests have been added to his, and Cooper Union has come to stand, in a way, for civic righteousness.

The year 1795 saw the birth of two children who were destined to do a great work for their country--George Peabody and Johns Hopkins. Both were the sons of poor parents, with little opportunity for achieving the sort of learning which is taught in schools; but both, by hard experience with the world, gained another sort of learning which is often of more practical value. At the age of eleven, George Peabody was forced to begin to earn his own living, and a place was found for him in a grocery store. His habits were good, he did his work well, and finally, at the age of nineteen, was offered a partners.h.i.+p by another merchant, who had noticed and admired his energy and enthusiasm. The business increased, branch houses were established, and at the age of thirty-five, George Peabody found himself at the head of a great business, his elder partner having retired. He decided to make London his place of residence, and became a sort of guardian angel for Americans visiting the great English capital. He had never married, and it seemed almost as if the whole world were his family. His constant thought was of how he could elevate humanity, and he was not long in putting some of his plans into effect.

In 1852, his native town of Danvers, Ma.s.sachusetts, celebrated her centennial, and her most distinguished citizen was, of course, invited to be present. He was too busy to attend, but sent a sealed envelope to be opened on the day of the celebration. The seal was broken at the dinner with which the celebration closed, and the envelope was found to contain two slips of paper. On one was written this toast, "Education--a debt due from present to future generations." The other was a check for twenty thousand dollars, afterwards increased to two hundred and fifty thousand, for the purpose of founding an Inst.i.tute, with a free library and free course of lectures. Four years later, the Peabody Inst.i.tute was dedicated, its founder being in attendance. Soon afterwards, he decided to build a similar Inst.i.tute at Baltimore, only on a more elaborate scale, as befitting the greater city, and gave a million dollars for the purpose. It was opened in 1869, twenty thousand school children gathering to meet the donor and forming a guard of honor for him.

Two other great gifts marked his life--the sum of three million dollars for the erection of model tenements for the London poor, and a like sum for the education of the American negro. When, in 1869 the end came in London, a great funeral was held at Westminster Abbey, and the Queen of England sent her n.o.blest man-of-war to bear in state across the Atlantic the body of "her friend," the poor boy of Danvers.

It is a strange coincidence that Baltimore, which had profited so greatly from George Peabody's philanthropy, should also be the object of that of Johns Hopkins. The latter was of Quaker stock, was raised on a farm, and at the age of seventeen became a clerk in his uncle's grocery store at Baltimore. He soon acc.u.mulated enough capital to go into business for himself, first as a grocer, then as a banker, and finally as one of the backers of the Baltimore & Ohio Railway. In 1873, he gave property valued at four and a half millions to found in the city of Baltimore a hospital, which, by its charter, is free to all, regardless of race or color; and three and a half millions for the endowment of Johns Hopkins University, which, opened in 1876, has grown to be one of the most famous schools of law, medicine and science in the country.

Another Quaker, Ezra Cornell, is also a.s.sociated with the name of a great university. Reared among the hills of western New York, helping his father on his farm and in his little pottery, the boy soon developed considerable mechanical genius, and at the age of seventeen, with the help of only a younger brother, he built a new home for the family, a two-story frame dwelling, the largest and best in the neighborhood. He soon struck out into the world, engaged in businesses of various kinds with varying success, but it was not until he was thirty-six years old that he found his vocation.

It was at that time he became a.s.sociated with S. F. B. Morse, who engaged him to superintend the erection of the first line of telegraph between Was.h.i.+ngton and Baltimore. Thereafter he devoted himself entirely to the development of the new invention; succeeded, after many rebuffs and disappointments, in organizing a company to erect a line from New York to Was.h.i.+ngton, and superintended its construction. It was the first of many, afterwards consolidated into the Western Union Telegraph Company, which, for many years, held a monopoly of the telegraph business of the country, and which made Ezra Cornell a millionaire. He himself was well advanced in years, and finally retired from active life, buying a great estate near Ithaca, New York, where he lived quietly, devising a method for the best disposition of his great fortune.

He at last decided to found an inst.i.tution "where _any_ person can find instruction in _any_ study." Work was begun at once, and in 1868, Cornell College was formally opened, over four hundred students entering the first year. The founder's gifts to this inst.i.tution aggregated over three millions. Many other bequests followed, which have made Cornell one of the most liberally-endowed colleges in the country. Froude, the great English historian, visited it on one occasion, and afterwards said:

"There is something I admire even more than the university, and that is the quiet, unpretending man by whom it was founded. We have had such men in old times, and there are men in England who make great fortunes and who make claim to great munificence; but who manifest their greatness in buying great estates and building castles for the founding of peerages to be handed down from father to son. Mr. Cornell has sought for immortality, and the perpetuity of his name among the people of a free nation. There stands his great university, built upon a rock, to endure while the American nation endures."

The next great benefaction we have to record is, in some respects, unique. John Fox Slater was born in Slatersville, Rhode Island, in 1815.

He was the son of Samuel Slater, proprietor of the greatest cotton-mills in New England, and he naturally succeeded to the business upon his father's death. The business prospered, receiving a great impetus from the invention of the cotton-gin, and Slater's wealth increased rapidly.

He had, on more than one occasion, visited the south and seen the negroes at work in the cotton fields. As time went on, the idea grew in his mind that he should do something for these poor laborers to whom, indirectly, his own fortune was due, and in 1882, he set aside the sum of one million dollars for the purpose of "uplifting the lately emanc.i.p.ated population of the Southern States, and their posterity." For this gift he received the thanks of Congress. No part of the gift is spent for grounds or buildings, but the whole income is spent in a.s.sisting negroes in industrial education and in preparing them to be the teachers of their own race. By the extraordinary ability of the fund's treasurer, it has been increased to a million and a half, although half a million has been expended along the lines contemplated by the donor. This, with the Peabody fund, comprises a powerful agency in working out the difficult problem of negro education.

The fortunes of such men as Peabody and Cornell and Hopkins and Peter Cooper seem small enough to-day when compared with the gigantic aggregations of money which a few men have succeeded in piling up. Not all of them, by any means, devote their wealth to philanthropy. Here, as in England, there are men concerned only with the idea of building up a family and a great estate; but there are a few who have labored as faithfully to use their wealth wisely as they did to acc.u.mulate it.

First of them is Leland Stanford, born in the valley of the Mohawk, studying law, and moving to Wisconsin to practise it, but losing his law library and all his property by fire, and finally joining the rush to the newly-discovered California gold-fields, where he arrived in 1852, being at that time twenty-eight years old. After some experience in the mines, he decided that there were surer ways of getting gold than digging for it, and set up a mercantile business in San Francisco, which grew rapidly in importance and proved the foundation of a vast fortune.

He was the first president of the Central Pacific Railroad, and was in charge of its construction over the mountains, driving the last spike at Promontory Point, Utah, on the tenth of May, 1869. He was prominent in the politics of state and nation, being elected to the United States Senate in 1885.

It is not by his public life, however, that he will be remembered, for he did nothing there that was in any way memorable, but by his gift of twenty million dollars to found a great university at Palo Alto, California, in memory of his only son. On May 14, 1887, the cornerstone of this great inst.i.tution was laid, and the university was formally opened in 1891. The idea of its founder was that it should teach not only the studies usually taught in college, but also other practical branches of education, such as telegraphy, type-setting, type-writing, book-keeping, and farming. This it has done, and so rapid has been its growth, that it now has over seventeen hundred students enrolled.

After Senator Stanford's death in 1893, the university was further endowed by his widow, Jane Lathrop Stanford, so that the present productive funds of the university, after all of the buildings have been paid for, amount to nearly twenty-five million dollars.

The second of the great givers of recent years is John Davison Rockefeller, whose name is synonymous with the greatest natural monopoly of modern times, the Standard Oil Company. His rise from clerk in a grocery store to one of the greatest capitalists in the history of the world is an interesting one, as well as an important one in the commercial history of America. Born at Richford, New York, in 1839, his parents moved to Cleveland, Ohio, when he was a boy of fourteen, and such education as he had was secured in the Cleveland public schools. He soon left school for business, getting employment first as clerk in a commission house, and at nineteen being junior partner in the firm of Clark & Rockefeller, commission merchants.

At that time the petroleum fields of Pennsylvania were just beginning to be developed, and young Rockefeller's attention was soon attracted to them. He seems to have been one of the first to realize the vast possibilities of the oil business, and in 1865, he and his brother William built at Cleveland a refinery which they called the Standard Oil Works. They had little money, but unlimited nerve, and very soon began the work of consolidation, which culminated in the formation of the Standard Oil Trust in 1882. They were able to kill compet.i.tion largely by securing from the railroads lower s.h.i.+pping rates than any compet.i.tor, in some cases going so far as to get a rebate on all oil s.h.i.+pped by compet.i.tors. That is, if a railroad charged the Standard Oil Company one dollar to carry its oil between two points and charged a compet.i.tor a dollar and a quarter for the same service, that extra quarter went, not into the coffers of the railroad, but into the coffers of the Standard Oil Company. Such methods of business have since been made illegal, and the Standard is compelled to do business on the same basis as its compet.i.tors, but its vast resources and occupancy of the field give it an advantage which nothing can counteract.

The operations of the Standard Oil Company naturally piled up a great fortune for John D. Rockefeller--how great cannot even be estimated. Not until comparatively recent years, did he turn his attention from making money to spending it, but when he did, it was in a royal fas.h.i.+on. Ten million dollars were given to the University of Chicago, which opened its doors in 1892, and now has an enrollment of over five thousand students; ten million more were given to the General Education Board, organized in 1903, for the purpose of promoting education in the United States, without distinction of race, s.e.x, or creed, and especially to promote and systematize various forms of educational beneficence; a million was given to Yale; the great Rockefeller Inst.i.tute for Medical Research was founded at New York and liberally endowed; and Mr.

Rockefeller's total benefactions probably exceed a total of thirty millions. This will soon be greatly increased, for he has just asked Congress to charter an inst.i.tution to be known as the Rockefeller Foundation, which he will endow on an enormous scale to carry out various plans of charity, through centuries to come.

He seems recently to have experienced a change of heart, too, toward the public. During his early years, he gained a reputation for coldness and reserve, which made him probably the best-hated man in the United States. Then, suddenly, he changed about. Instead of refusing himself to reporters, he welcomed them; he seemed glad to talk, anxious to show the public that he was by no means such a monster as he was painted; and he has even, quite recently, written his life story and given it to a great magazine for publication. Seldom before has any public man shown such a sudden and complete change of heart. He still remains, in a sense, an enigma, for it seems possible that the smiling face he has lately turned to the world conceals the real man more effectively than the frowning countenance he wore in former years.

As the dramatist saves his finest effect for the fall of the curtain, so we have saved for the last the most remarkable giver in history--Andrew Carnegie, whose total benefactions amount to at least one hundred millions of dollars. A sum so stupendous would bankrupt many a nation, yet Mr. Carnegie is so far from bankrupt that his gifts show no sign of diminution. The story of how, starting out as a poor boy, on the lowest round of the ladder, he acquired this immense fortune, is a striking one.

Andrew Carnegie was born in Scotland in 1835. His father was a weaver, at one time fairly well-to-do, for he owned four hand looms; but the introduction of steam ruined hand-loom weaving, and after a long struggle, ending in hards.h.i.+p and poverty, the looms were sold at a sacrifice and the family set sail for America. Mrs. Carnegie happened to have two sisters living at Pittsburgh, and there the family settled--by one of those curious chances of fate, the very place in all the world best suited to the development of young Andrew Carnegie's peculiar genius.

At the age of twelve years, he became a wage-earner, his first position being that of bobbin-boy in a cotton mill at Alleghany City, where his salary was $1.20 a week. Pretty soon he was set to firing a small engine in the cellar of the mill, but he did not like this work, and finally secured a position as messenger boy in the office of the Atlantic & Ohio Telegraph Company, at Pittsburgh. One night, at the end of the month, he did not receive his pay with the rest of the boys, but was told to wait till the others had left the room. He thought that dismissal was coming, and wondered how he could ever go home and tell his father and mother!

But he found that he was to be given an increase in salary, from $11.25 to $13.50 a month.

"I ran all the way home," said Mr. Carnegie, in telling of the incident, long afterwards. "Talk about your millionaires! All the millions I've made combined, never gave me the happiness of that rise of $2.25 a month. Arrived at the cottage where we lived, I handed my mother the usual $11.25, and that night in bed told brother Tom the great secret.

The next morning, Sunday, we were all sitting at the breakfast table, and I said: 'Mother, I have something else for you,' and then I gave her the $2.25, and told her how I got it. Father and she were delighted to hear of my good fortune, but, motherlike, she said I deserved it, and then came tears of joy."

It was at the dinner given, in 1907, in his honor as "Father of the Corps," by the surviving members of the United States Military Telegraph Corps of the Civil War, that Mr. Carnegie spoke these words, and he continued as follows:

"Comrades, I was born in poverty, and would not exchange its sacred memories with the richest millionaire's son who ever breathed. What does he know about mother or father? They are mere names to him. Give me the life of the boy whose mother is nurse, seamstress, washerwoman, cook, teacher, angel and saint, all in one, and whose father is guide, exemplar, and friend. These are the boys who are born to the best fortune. Some men think that poverty is a dreadful burden, and that wealth leads to happiness. They have lived only one side; they imagine the other. I have lived both, and I know there is very little in wealth that can add to human happiness, beyond the small comforts of life.

Millionaires who laugh are rare. My experience is that wealth is apt to take the smiles away."

But we are getting ahead of our story. That small increase in salary meant a good deal to the little family, whose father was working from dawn to dark in the cotton-mill, and whose mother was contributing what she could to the family earnings by binding shoes in the intervals of housework. Meantime the superintendent of the company for which the boy was working happened to meet him while visiting the Pittsburgh office, and it was discovered that both of them had been born near the same town in Scotland. The fact may have had something to do with the boy's subsequent promotion, and it is worth noting that forty years later, he was able to secure for his old employer the United States consuls.h.i.+p to the town of their birth. But for the time being, he was busy with his work as messenger-boy. He soon learned the Morse alphabet and practised making the signals early in the morning before the operators arrived. He was soon able to send and receive messages by means of the Morse register--a steel pen which embossed the dots and dashes of the message on a narrow strip of paper. But young Carnegie soon progressed a step beyond this, and was soon able to read the messages by sound, without need of the register. It was, of course, only a short time after that when he was regularly installed as operator.

He was not to remain long in the telegraph business, however, for Thomas A. Scott, superintendent of the Pittsburgh division of the Pennsylvania Railroad, offered him a position at a salary of $35 a month. Carnegie promptly accepted, and on February 1, 1853, at the age of seventeen, entered the employ of the road. His promotion was rapid, and he rose to be superintendent of the Pittsburgh division before the success of his other ventures caused him to resign from the service. These ventures were, in the first place, investment in the newly-developed oil-fields of Pennsylvania, which yielded a great profit, and afterwards the establishment of a steel rolling-mill, in the development of which he found his true vocation, building up the most complete system of iron and steel industries ever controlled by an individual. Some idea of the value of the business may be gained from the fact that, when the United States Steel Corporation was organized in 1901 to take over Mr.

Carnegie's interests he received for them, first mortgage bonds to the amount of three hundred million dollars.

It is this sum which he has been disposing of for years. Unlike most other philanthropists, he has not used his wealth to endow a great university, but has devoted it mainly to another branch of education, the establishment of free public libraries. He conceived the unique plan of offering a library building, completely equipped, to any community which would agree to maintain it suitably, and, by the beginning of 1909, had, under this plan, given nearly fifty-two millions of dollars for the erection of 1858 buildings, of which 1167 are in this country.

Among his other great gifts was one of $12,000,000, for the founding at Was.h.i.+ngton of an inst.i.tution "which shall, in the broadest and most liberal manner, encourage investigation, research, and discovery, show the application of knowledge to the improvement of mankind, and provide such buildings, laboratories, books, and apparatus as may be needed."

The sum of ten millions was given to the great Carnegie Inst.i.tute, of Pittsburgh; still another ten millions were given to Scottish universities, and still another for the purpose of providing pensions for college professors in the United States and Canada; and finally five millions for the establishment of a fund to be used for the benefit of the dependants of those losing their lives in heroic effort to save their fellow-men, or for the heroes themselves, if injured only. What great benefaction will next be announced cannot, of course, be foretold, but that some other announcement will some day be forthcoming can scarcely be doubted, since Mr. Carnegie has announced his ambition to die poor.

Although born in Scotland and maintaining a great estate there, he is an American out-and-out. He proved his patriotism during the Civil War by serving as superintendent of military railways and government telegraph lines in the east; and has proved it more than once since by enlisting in the fight for civic betterment and good government. Thousands of benefactions stand to his credit, besides the great ones which have been mentioned above, and it is doubtful if in the history of the world there has ever been another man armed with such power and using it in such a way.

We will end here the story of American benefactions, although scarcely the half of it has been told. During the last forty years, not less than one hundred millions of dollars have been given to American colleges; nearly as much again has been given for the endowment of hospitals, sanitariums and infirmaries; vast sums have been given for other educational or charitable purposes, so that, of the great fortunes which have been acc.u.mulated in this country, at least three hundred millions have been returned, in some form or other, to the people. And the end is not yet. Scientific philanthropy is as yet in its infancy. Just the other day, Mrs. Russell Sage set apart the sum of ten million dollars for a fund whose chief and almost sole purpose it is to obtain accurate information concerning social and economic conditions--in other words, to furnish the data upon which the scientific philanthropy of the future will be based. The disposition toward such employment of great fortunes, and away from the selfish piling-up of wealth is one of the most cheering and promising developments of the new century in this great land of ours; the kings of finance are coming to realize that, after all, wealth is useless unless it is used for good, and the next half century will no doubt witness the establishment of philanthropic enterprises on a scale hitherto unknown to history.

We have already said that the highest form of philanthropy is not the giving of money, but the giving of self, and we shall close this chapter with a brief consideration of the careers of a few of the many men and women who, in the course of American history, have devoted their lives to the betterment of humanity, either as ministers of the gospel or as laborers for some great reform.

[Ill.u.s.tration: BEECHER]

Among ministers, no name has been more widely known than that of Beecher--first, Lyman Beecher, and afterwards his brilliant son, Henry Ward Beecher. Lyman Beecher was born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1775, the son of a blacksmith, and his youth was spent between blacksmithing and farming. His love of books soon manifested itself, however, and means were found to prepare him for Yale, where he graduated at the age of twenty-two. A further year of study enabled him to enter the ministry. For sixteen years, he was pastor of the Congregational church at Litchfield, Connecticut, and soon took rank as the leading clergyman of his denomination. His eloquence, zeal and courage won a wide reputation, and in 1832, he was offered the presidency of the newly-organized Lane seminary, at Cincinnati. This place he held for twenty years, and his name was continued as president in the seminary catalogue, until his death.

Soon after he a.s.sumed this position, the slavery question began to a.s.sume the acute phase which ended in the Civil War. Mr. Beecher was, of course, an Abolitionist, and for a time lived in a turmoil, for many of the seminary students were from the south, while Cincinnati itself was so near the borderline that there was a great pro-slavery sentiment there. But during Mr. Beecher's absence, his trustees tried to allay excitement and, in a way, carry water on both shoulders, by forbidding all further discussion of slavery in the seminary, and succeeded in nearly wrecking the inst.i.tution, for the students withdrew in a body, and while a few were persuaded to return, the great majority refused to do so and laid the foundation of Oberlin College. For seventeen years, Mr. Beecher labored to restore the seminary's prosperity, but finally abandoned the task in despair. He resigned the presidency in 1852, intending to devote his remaining years to the revision and publication of his works, but a paralytic stroke put an end to his active career.

Mr. Beecher's vigor of mind and body were imparted in a remarkable degree to his children, of whom he had thirteen. Of Harriet Beecher Stowe we have already spoken, but by far the most famous of them was Henry Ward Beecher. Born in 1813, and renouncing an early desire for a sea-faring life in favor of the ministry, he secured his first charge in 1837, and ten years later entered upon the pastorate of Plymouth church, in Brooklyn, where his chief fame was won. The church, one of the largest in the country, soon became inadequate to hold the crowds which flocked to hear his brilliant preaching. As a lecturer and platform orator he soon came to be in such demand that he was at last compelled to decline all such engagements. He took an active part in politics, holding that Christianity was not a series of dogmas, but a rule of everyday life, and did not hesitate to attack the abuses of the day from the pulpit. He was as facile with the pen as with the tongue, and his publications were many and important. All in all, he was one of the most influential and picturesque figures that has ever occupied an American pulpit.

Lyman Beecher was at all times a doughty antagonist, and in 1826 he had been called to Boston to take up the cudgels against the so-called Unitarian movement which had developed there, under the leaders.h.i.+p of William Ellery Channing. For six years and a half, he wielded the cudgels of controversy, but with no great effect, for Channing was a foeman in every sense his equal. Channing had graduated at Harvard in 1798, a small man of an almost feminine sensibility, with a singular capacity for winning devoted attachment from all with whom he came in contact. For two years, he served as tutor in a family at Richmond, Virginia, where he acquired an abhorrence of slavery that lasted through life. Upon his return north, he began the study of theology at Cambridge, and in 1803, became pastor of a church in Boston, where he soon attracted attention by sermons of a rare "fervor, solemnity, and beauty." He was from the first identified with the movement of thought, which came to be known as Unitarian, and gave to the body so-called a consciousness of its position and a clear statement of its convictions with his sermon delivered at Baltimore, in 1819, on the occasion of the ordination of Jared Sparks. For the fifteen years succeeding, Channing was best known to the public as the leader of the Unitarian movement, and his sermons delivered during that period const.i.tute the best body of practical divinity which that movement has produced. In later years, he was identified with many philanthropical and reform movements, and was one of the pillars of the anti-slavery cause, though never adopting the extreme opinions of the abolitionists. Of his rare quality and power as a pulpit orator many traditions remain, and his death at the age of sixty-two removed a great power for righteousness.

Even to give a list of the men and women who have sacrificed their lives in the attempt to carry the gospel of Christianity to heathen nations is beyond the limits of a book like this, but at least mention can be made of two of the earliest, Adoniram Judson and his wife, whose experiences form one of the most thrilling chapters in missionary history.

Adoniram Judson was born in Malden, Ma.s.sachusetts, in 1788, and after graduating at Brown University, and taking a special course at Andover Theological seminary, became deeply interested in foreign missions, and in 1810, determined to go to Burmah. Securing the support of the London Missionary Society, he sailed for Asia on the nineteenth of February, 1812. Two weeks before, he had married Ann Haseltine, who consented to share his work, and who sailed with him. On that long voyage, they had ample time to discuss and consider the various dogmas of their faith, and they became convinced that the baptism of the New Testament was immersion, and in accordance with this view, both of them were baptized by immersion upon reaching Calcutta. But this change of faith cut them off from the body which had sent them to India, and it was not until 1814 that the Baptists of America took the two missionaries under their care.

Meanwhile, Dr. Judson mastered the Burmese language and began his public preaching. Before long, he baptized his first convert, and pushed forward the work with renewed zeal, translating the gospels into Burmese, publis.h.i.+ng tracts in that language, and undertaking the most perilous journeys. The Burmese government had never been friendly, and in 1824, seized the missionaries and threw them into prison. They were confined in the "death hole," reeking with foul air, without light, and were loaded with fetters. Just enough food was given them to keep them alive, and at last, stripped almost naked, they were driven like cattle under the burning sun, to another prison, where it was intended to burn them alive. They were saved by the intercession of Sir Archibald Campbell, but Mrs. Judson's health had been wrecked by the terrible experience. She never recovered, dying two years later. Undaunted by difficulties, Dr. Judson continued his work, completing his translation of the Bible, travelling over India, compiling a Burmese grammar and dictionary, but his labors at last undermined even his const.i.tution and he died at sea in 1850, while on his way to the Isle of France.

Turn we now to Lucretia Mott, one of the most extraordinary women who ever lived in America. Born in Nantucket in 1793, the daughter of a sea-captain named Thomas Coffin, she was raised in the strict Quaker faith, to which her parents belonged. She began teaching while still a girl, and at the age of eighteen, married a fellow teacher, James Mott.

It was not long after that, that she developed the "gift" of speaking at the Quaker meetings, simply, earnestly and eloquently. The Quakers had always opposed slavery and Lucretia Mott was soon working heart and soul against it. When the American Anti-Slavery Society was organized in 1833, she was one of four women who joined it, and she proceeded immediately to organize the Female Anti-Slavery Society, the first organization of women in America working for a political purpose. Years of abuse followed, for in those days anti-slavery lecturers were tarred and feathered, their homes burned, and many other indignities heaped upon them. Throughout all this, Mrs. Mott never lost her serenity, and never suffered bodily injury. On one occasion, the annual meeting of the Anti-Slavery Society, in New York, was broken up by a mob, and some of the speakers were roughly handled. Perceiving that some of the women were badly frightened, Mrs. Mott asked her escort to look after them.

"But who will take care of you?" he asked.

"This man will," she said, and smilingly laid her hand upon the arm of one of the leaders of the mob. "He will see me safe through."