Part 25

rmission. The bride called it a Cooper union. The Campbells, very properly, were Scotch, and the Scotch have a bad habit of thinking themselves a trifle better than the English. Like the Irish, they regard an Englishman with suspicion. The Scotch swear that they have never been conquered, certainly not by J. Bull, who has always been quite willing to give them anything they ask for. At the time of his marriage, Sergeant Cooper was engaged in the laudable business of looking after General Campbell's horses, and also, let it be known, of making garden for the Campbell family. In his garden work, John Cooper was under the immediate orders of Margaret Campbell. After hours, the Sergeant used to play a piccolo, and among other tuneful lays he piped one called "The Campbells Are Coming." It was on one such musical occasion that the young couple simply walked off and got married, thus proving a point which I have long held, to wit: Music is a secondary love manifestation. On being informed of the facts, General Campbell promptly ordered that Sergeant John Cooper be shot. Before the execution could take place, the sentence was commuted to thirty days in the guardhouse. After serving one day, the culprit was pardoned on petition of his wife. In a month he was made a captain, and later a lieutenant. The business of a soldier is not apt to be of a kind to develop his mental resources. Soldiers fight under orders; and initiative, production and economy are mere abstractions to your man of the sword. Suffice it to say that in the war, John Cooper lost the ability to become a civilian of the first rank. He was industrious but improvident; he made money and he lost it. He had a habit of abandoning good inventions for worse ones. The ability to eliminate is good, but in sifting ideas let us cleave to those that are workable, until Fate proves there is something really better. Peter Cooper was the fifth child in a family of nine. Bees know the secret of sex, but man does not. Peter Cooper's mother thought that her fifth child was to be a girl, but it was not until after the boy had grown to be a man and was proving his prowess, that his parents remembered why they had called him Peter, and said, "On this rock shall our family be built." To be born of parents who do not know how to get on, and be one of a big family, is a great blessing. We are taught by antithesis quite as much as by injunction and direction. And chiefest of all we are taught through struggle, and not through immunity in that vacuum called complete success. Peter Cooper's childhood was one of toil and ceaseless endeavor. Just one year did he go to school, just one year in all his life, and then for only half a day at a time. His short ration of books made him anxious to know, anxious to learn, and so his disadvantages gave him a thing which college often fails to bestow--that is, the Study Habit. And the reason he got it was because he wanted to go to school and could not. Happy Peter Cooper! And yet he never really knew that many a youth is sent to school and dinged at by pedagogues until examinations become a nightmare, and college a penalty. Thus it happens that many a college graduate is so rejoiced on getting through and standing "on the threshold," that he never looks in a book afterward. Of such a one we can very properly say, "He got his education in college"--when all the world knows that the education that really amounts to anything is that which we get out of Life. * * * * * The climbing propensities of Peter Cooper were made manifest very early in life. Later, they developed into a habit; and shifting ground from the physical to the psychic, he continued to climb all his life. Also he made others climb, for no man climbeth by himself alone. At twelve, Peter Cooper proudly walked the ridgepole of the family residence, to the great astonishment and admiration of the little girls and the jealousy of the boys. When the children would run in breathlessly and announce to the busy mother, "Peter, he is on the house!" the mother would reply, "Then he will not get drowned in the Hudson River!" At other times it was, "Peter, he is swimming across the river!" The mother then found solace in the thought that the boy was not in immediate danger of sliding off the house and breaking his neck. Once, little Peter climbed a lofty elm to get a hanging bird's-nest that was built far out on a high projecting limb. He reached the nest all right, but his diagnosis was not correct, for it proved to be a hornets' nest, beyond dispute. To escape the wrath of the hornets, Peter descended the tree "overhand," which being interpreted means that he dropped and caught the limbs as he went down so as to decrease the speed. The last drop was about thirty feet. The fall didn't hurt, but the sudden stop broke his collar-bone, knocked out three teeth, and cut a scar on his chin that lasted him all of his days. Life is a dangerous business--few get out of it alive. Life consists in betting on your power to do--to achieve--to accomplish--to climb--to become. If you mistake hornets for birds, you pay the penalty for your error, as you pay for all mistakes. The only men who do things are those who dare. Safety can be secured by doing nothing, saying nothing, being nothing. Here's to those who dare! Because a thing had never been done before was to Peter Cooper no reason why it should not be done now. And although he innocently stirred up a few hornets' nests, he became a good judge of both birds and hornets through personal experience. That is the advantage of making mistakes. But wisdom lies in not responding to encores. Peter Cooper's body was marked by the falls, mauls, hauls, and scars of burns and explosions. Surely if God does not look us over for medals and diplomas, but for scars, then Peter Cooper fulfilled the requirements. When seventeen years old, he went down to New York and apprenticed himself to a coachmaker, Woodward by name. He was to get his board, washing and mending, and twenty-five dollars a year. It was a four-year contract--selling himself into service and servitude. The first two years he saved twenty dollars out of his wages. The third year his employer voluntarily paid him fifty dollars; and the fourth year seventy-five. In short, the young man had mastered the trade. Woodward's shop was at the corner of Broadway and Chambers Street, which was then the northern limit of the city. Just beyond this was a big garden, worked by a prosperous and enterprising Irishman who supplied vegetables to ship-captains. This garden later was transformed into City Hall Park, and here the city buildings were erected, the finest in America for their purpose. The Irish still command the place. New York City then had less than forty thousand inhabitants. Peter Cooper was to see the city grow to two million. For seventy-one years after his majority he was to take an active and intelligent interest in its evolution, tinting its best thought and hopes with his own aspiration. The building of coaches then was a great trade. It was stagecoach times, and a good coach was worth anywhere from three hundred to a thousand dollars. The work was done by small concerns, where the proprietors and their 'prentices would turn out three or four vehicles a year. To build the finest coaches in the world was the ambition of Peter Cooper. But to get a little needed capital he hired out to a manufacturer of woolen cloth at Hempstead, Long Island, for a dollar and a half a day. A dollar a day was good wages then, but Cooper had inventive skill in working with machinery. He had already invented and patented a machine for mortising the hubs of wagon-wheels. Now he perfected a machine for finishing woolen cloth. As the invention was made on the time of, and in the mill where he worked, he was given only a one-third interest in it. He went on a visit to his old home at Peekskill and there met Matthew Vassar, who was to send the name of Vassar down the corridors of time, not as that of a weaver of wool and the owner of a very good brewery, but as the founder of a school for girls, or as it is somewhat anomalously called, "a female seminary." Peter Cooper sold the county-right of his patent to Matthew Vassar for five hundred dollars. It was more money than the father had ever seen at one time in all his life. The War of Eighteen Hundred Twelve was on, and woolen cloth was in great demand, the supply from England having been shut off. Opportunity and Peter Cooper met, or is the man himself Opportunity? The ratio of marriages, we are told, keeps pace with the price of corn. On the strength of his five hundred dollars, Peter Cooper embarked on the sea of matrimony, as the village editors express it. When Peter Cooper married Sarah Bedell, it was a fortunate thing for the world. Peter Cooper was a Commonsense Man, which is really better than to be a genius. A Commonsense Man is one who does nothing to make people think he is different from what he is. He is one who would rather be than seem! But a Commonsense Man needs a Commonsense Woman to help him live a Commonsense Life. Mrs. Cooper was a Commonsense Woman. She was of Huguenot parentage. Persecution had given the Huguenots a sternness of mental and moral fiber, just as it had blessed and benefited the Puritans. The habit of independent thought got into the veins of these Huguenots, and they played important parts in the War of the Revolution. Like the Jews, they made good Freethinkers. They reason things out without an idolatrous regard for precedent. For fifty-seven years Peter and Sarah fought the battle of life together. He clarified his thought by explaining his plans to her, and together they grew rich--rich in money, rich in knowledge, rich in experience, rich in love. * * * * * There are men who are not content to put all their eggs into one basket, and then watch the basket. Peter Cooper craved the excitement of adventure. His nature demanded new schemes, new plans, new methods upon which to break the impulse of his mind. The trade-wind of his genius did not blow constantly from one direction. Had he been content to focus on coach-building, he could have become rich beyond the dream of avarice. As it was, the fact that he could build as good a coach as any one else satisfied that quarter-section of his nature. When the war of Eighteen Hundred Twelve closed, there was a great shrinkage in wool. Peter Cooper sold his holdings for a grocery-store, which he ran just long enough to restock and sell to a man who wanted it more than he did. Then he started a furniture-factory, for he was an expert worker in wood. But the bench for him was only by-play. As he worked, his mind roamed the world. He used glue in making the furniture. He bought his glue from a man who had a little factory on the site of what is now the Park Avenue Hotel. The man who made the glue did not like the business. He wanted to make furniture, just as comedians always want to play Hamlet. Peter Cooper's furniture-shop was in a rented building. The glue-man owned his site. Peter Cooper traded his furniture-shop for the glue-factory, and got a deed to the premises. He was then thirty-three years old. The glue-factory was the foundation of his fortune. He made better glue and more glue than any other concern in America. Few men of brains would get stuck on the glue business. There are features about it not exactly pleasant. The very difficulties of it, however, attracted Cooper. He never referred to his glue-factory as a chemical laboratory, nor did he call it a studio. He was proud of his business. He made the first isinglass manufacture