Behind this generous distribution of his great wealth was a desire to distribute his fortune before his death. “The day is not far distant,” he once said, “when the man who dies leaving behind him available wealth which was free to him to administer during life, will pass away ‘unwept, unhonored and unsung,’ no matter to what use he leaves the dross that he cannot take away with him. Of such the public verdict will be: ‘The man who dies thus rich, dies disgraced.’” Many other worthy causes held Carnegie’s interest from his retirement from business to his death. Of all his public activities, he took perhaps greatest interest in the cause of world peace. He believed in arbitration instead of war, and aided in the organization of various leagues and commissions to that end. But although Carnegie was one of the world’s most generous givers he had no desire to abolish poverty. “We should,” he said, “be quite willing to abolish luxury, but to abolish honest, industrious, self-denying poverty would be to destroy the soil upon which mankind produces the virtues which enable our race to reach a still higher civilization than it now possesses.” Not to help men were his millions given, but to help men to help themselves. In his long list of philanthropies, education is the goal. “Nothing for the submerged,” was his motto; but for the boy or man who honestly strove to force his way upward Carnegie would give all. During the latter years of his life honors came to him. He was made Lord Rector of the University of St. Andrews, Edinburgh, in 1903, and received from the same university the degree of Doctor of Laws in 1905. In 1907 France made him a Commander of the Legion of Honor, and in the same year the Queen of Holland conferred on him the Order of Orange-Nassau. By his adopted country he was held in high regard, and among other honors was made an honorary alumnus of the University of Princeton. Simple, as his parents had been before him, in spite of his vast wealth which opened the world to him, Carnegie desired that the world should know his pride in his own hard struggle and in the poverty of his birth. On the crest which he designed for himself is a weaver’s shuttle, indicating his father’s occupation, and there is a coronet turned upside down, surmounted by a liberty cap, and supported by American and Scots flags. The motto is “Death to Privilege.” To radical minds there is food for thought in this strange crest and its motto, for they who cry death to privilege often mean death to ambition, and without ambition the son of the weaver would never have become the world benefactor who made himself able to give wealth by the hundreds of millions for the good of humanity. On the day following his death, in the summer of 1919, a great New York newspaper began an account of his life with these paragraphs, a final tribute to an American by adoption:—