" 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 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 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 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.
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