Part 24

it was each for himself and the devil take the hindmost--it was a stampede. System and order went by the board. The strongest stole the most, as usual, but all got a little. And England's gain in citizens was our loss. Astor lost a million dollars by the venture. He smiled calmly and said: "The plan was right, but my men were weak--that is all. The gateway to China will be from the Northwest. My plans were correct. Time will vindicate my reasoning." When the block on Broadway, bounded by Vesey and Barclay Streets, was cleared of its plain two-story houses preparatory to building the Astor House, wise men shook their heads and said, "It's too far uptown." But the free bus that met all boats solved the difficulty, and gave the cue to hotel-men all over the world. The hotel that runs full is a goldmine. Hungry men feed, and the beautiful part about the hotel business is that the customers are hungry the next day--also thirsty. Astor was worth ten millions, but he took a personal delight in sitting in the lobby of the Astor House and watching the dollars roll into this palace that his brain had planned. To have an idea--to watch it grow--to then work it out, and see it made manifest in concrete substance, this was his joy. The Astor House was a bigger hostelry in its day than the Waldorf-Astoria is now. Astor was tall, thin, and commanding in appearance. He had only one hallucination, and that was that he spoke the English language. The accent he possessed at thirty was with him in all its pristine effulgence at eighty-five. "Nopody vould know I vas a Cherman--aind't it?" he used to say. He spoke French, a dash of Spanish, and could parley in Choctaw, Ottawa, Mohawk and Huron. But they who speak several languages must not be expected to speak any one language well. Yet when John Jacob wrote, it was English without a flaw. In all his dealings he was uniquely honorable and upright. He paid and he made others pay. His word was his bond. He was not charitable in the sense of indiscriminate giving. "To give something for nothing is to weaken the giver," was one of his favorite sayings. That this attitude protected a miserly spirit, it is easy to say, but it is not wholly true. In his later years he carried with him a book containing a record of his possessions. This was his breviary. In it he took a very pardonable delight. He would visit a certain piece of property, and then turn to his book and see what it had cost him ten or twenty years before. To realize that his prophetic vision had been correct was to him a great source of satisfaction. His habits were of the best. He went to bed at nine o'clock, and was up before six. At seven he was at his office. He knew enough to eat sparingly and to walk, so he was never sick. Millionaires as a rule are wofully ignorant. Up to a certain sum, they grow with their acquisitions. Then they begin to wither at the heart. The care of a fortune is a penalty. I advise the gentle reader to think twice before accumulating ten millions. John Jacob Astor was exceptional in his combined love of money and love of books. History was at his tongue's end, and geography was his plaything. Fitz-Greene Halleck was his private secretary, hired on a basis of literary friendship. Washington Irving was a close friend, too, and first crossed the Atlantic on an Astor pass. He banked on Washington Irving's genius, and loaned him money to come and go, and buy a house. Irving was named in Astor's will as one of the trustees of the Astor Library Fund, and repaid all favors by writing "Astoria." Astor died, aged eighty-six. It was a natural death, a thing that very seldom occurs. The machinery all ran down at once. Realizing his lack of book advantages, he left by his will four hundred thousand dollars to found the Astor Library, in order that others might profit where he had lacked. He also left fifty thousand dollars to his native town of Waldorf, a part of which money was used to found an Astor Library there. God is surely good, for if millionaires were immortal, their money would cause them great misery and the swollen fortunes would crowd mankind, not only 'gainst the wall, but into the sea. Death is the deliverer, for Time checks power and equalizes all things, and gives the new generation a chance. Astor hated gamblers. He never confused gambling, as a mode of money-getting, with actual production. He knew that gambling produces nothing--it merely transfers wealth, changes ownership. And since it involves loss of time and energy it is a positive waste. Yet to buy land and hold it, thus betting on its rise in value, is not production, either. Nevertheless, this was to Astor legitimate and right. Henry George threw no shadow before, and no economist had ever written that to secure land and hold it unused, awaiting a rise in value, was a dog-in-the-manger, unethical and selfish policy. Morality is a matter of longitude and time. Astor was a member of the Dutch Reformed Church, and yet he lived out his days with a beautiful and perfect disbelief in revealed religion. He knew enough of biology to know that religions are not "revealed"--they are evolved. Yet he recognized the value of the Church as a social factor. To him it was a good police system, and so when rightly importuned he gave, with becoming moderation, to all faiths and creeds. A couple of generations back in his ancestry there was a renegade Jew who loved a Christian girl, and thereby molted his religion. When Cupid crosses swords with a priest, religion gets a death-stroke. This stream of free blood was the inheritance of John Jacob Astor. William B. Astor, the son of John Jacob, was brought up in the financial way he should go. He was studious, methodical, conservative, and had the good sense to carry out the wishes of his father. His son, John Jacob Astor, was very much like him, only of more neutral tint. The time is now ripe for another genius in the Astor family. If William B. Astor lacked the courage and initiative of his parent, he had more culture, and spoke English without an accent. The son of John Jacob Astor second is William Waldorf Astor, who speaks English with an English accent, you know. John Jacob Astor, besides having the first store for the sale of musical instruments in America, organized the first orchestra of over twelve players. He brought over a leader from Germany, and did much to foster the love of music in the New World. Every worthy Maecenas imagines that he is a great painter, writer, sculptor or musician, sidetracked by material cares thrust upon him by unkind Fate. John Jacob Astor once told Washington Irving that it was only business responsibility that prevented his being a novelist; and at other times he declared his intent to take up music as a profession as soon as he had gotten all of his securities properly tied up. And whether John Jacob worked out his dreams or not, there is no doubt that they added to his peace, happiness and length of days. Happy indeed is the man who escapes the critics by leaving his literary masterpiece in the ink. PETER COOPER Let our schools teach the nobility of labor and the beauty of human service, but the superstitions of ages past--never! --_Peter Cooper_ [Illustration: PETER COOPER] Peter Cooper was born in New York City in the year Seventeen Hundred Ninety-one. He lived to be ninety-two years old, passing out in Eighteen Hundred Eighty-three. He was, successively, laborer, clerk, mechanic, inventor, manufacturer, financier, teacher, philanthropist and philosopher. If Robert Owen was the world's first modern merchant, Peter Cooper was America's first businessman. He seems to have been the first prominent man in the United States to abandon that legal wheeze, "Caveat emptor." In fact, he worked for the buyer, and considered the other man's interests before he did his own. He practised the Golden Rule and made it pay, while the most of us yet regard it as a kind of interesting experiment. I have said a few oblique things about city-bred boys and city people in general, but I feel like apologizing for them and doing penance when I think of restless, tireless, eager, brave, honest and manly Peter Cooper. When that New York City woman, last week, observing a beautiful brass model of an Oliver Plow on my mantel, asked me, "What is this musical instrument?" she proved herself not of the Peter Cooper tribe. She was the other kind--the kind that seeing the pollywogs remarks, "Oh, how lovely--they will all be butterflies next week!" Or, "Which cow is it that gives the butter-milk?" a question that once made Nathan Straus walk on his hands. Although Peter Cooper was born in New York City and had a home there most of his life, he loved the country, and for many years made Sunday sacred for the woods and fields. Yet as a matter of strictest truth let it be stated that, although Peter Cooper was born in New York City, when he was two years old, like Bill Nye, he persuaded his parents to move. The family gravitated to the then little village of Peekskill, and here the lad lived until he was seventeen years old. Next to Benjamin Franklin, Peter Cooper was our all-round educated American. His perfect health--living to a great age--with sanity and happiness as his portion, proves him to be one who knew the laws of health and also had the will to obey them. He never "retired from business"--if he quit one kind of work it was to take up something more difficult. He was in the fight to the day of his death; and always he carried the flag further to the front. He was a Freethinker at a time when to have thoughts of your own was to be an outcast. His restless mind was no more satisfied with an outworn theology than with an outgrown system of transportation. His religion was blended with his work and fused with his life. He built the first railway-locomotive in America, and was its engineer until he taught others how. He rolled the first iron rails for railroads. He made the first iron beams for use in constructing fireproof buildings. He was the near and dear friend and adviser of Cyrus W. Field, and lent his inventive skill, his genius and his money, to the laying of the Atlantic Cable; and was the President of the Atlantic Cable Company for eighteen years. In building and endowing Cooper Union, he outlined a system of education so beneficent that it attracted the attention of the thinking men of the world. And it is even now serving as a model upon which our entire public-school system will yet be founded--a system that works not for culture, for bric-a-brac purposes, but for character and competence. A what-not education may be impressive, but is worthless as collateral. The achievements of Peter Cooper make the average successful man look like a pigmy. What the world needs is a few more Peter Coopers--rich men who do not absolve themselves by drawing checks for charity, but who give their lives for human betterment. Let us catch up with Peter Cooper. * * * * * John Cooper, the father of Peter Cooper, was of English stock. He was twenty-one years old in that most unforgetable year, Seventeen Hundred Seventy-six. At the first call to arms, he enlisted as a minuteman. He fought valiantly through the war, in the field, and in the fortifications surrounding New York City, and came out of Freedom's fight penniless, but with one valuable possession--a wife. In Seventeen Hundred Seventy-nine, he married the daughter of General John Campbell, his commander, who was then stationed at West Point. It was an outrageous thing for a sergeant to do, and I am sorry to say it was absolutely without orders or parental pe