Brave Men and Women: Their Struggles, Failures, And TriumphsFuller, Osgood E. (Osgood Eaton)
History
Brave Men and Women: Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs
Fuller, Osgood E. (Osgood Eaton)
Biography
spur on the steed! The old man just ahead, and all the pack of hounds
close after him. Now they are coming in at the death, that last dollar
only a short distance ahead. The old hunter, with panting breath and
pale cheek and outstretched arm, clutches for it as it turns on its
track, but, missing it, keeps on till the exhausted dollar plunges into
a hole and burrows and burrows deep; and the old hunter, with both
hands, claws at the earth, and claws deeper down, till the burrowed
embankment gives way, and he rolls over into his own grave. We often
talk of old misers. There are but few old misers. The most of them are
comparatively young. Avarice massacres more than a war. In contrast,
behold the philanthropist in the nineties, and dying of a cold caught in
going to look after the affairs of the institution he himself founded,
and which has now about two thousand five hundred persons a day in its
reading-rooms and libraries, and two thousand students in its evening
schools.
Again, Peter Cooper has shown the world a good way of settling the old
quarrel between capital and labor, the altercation between rich and
poor. There are two ways in which this conflict can never be settled.
One is the violent suppression of the laboring classes, and the other
the violent assault of the rich. This is getting to be the age of
dynamite--dynamite under the Kremlin, dynamite in proximity to
Parliament House and railroad track, dynamite near lordly mansions,
dynamite in Ireland, dynamite in England, dynamite in America. The rich
are becoming more exclusive, and the poor more irate. I prescribe for
the cure of this mighty evil of the world a large allopathic dose of
Peter Cooperism. You never heard of dynamite in Cooper Institute. You
never heard of any one searching the cellar of that man's house for a
keg of dynamite. At times of public excitement, when prominent men had
their houses guarded, there were no sentinels needed at his door. The
poorest man with a hod on his shoulder carrying brick up a wall
begrudged not the philanthropist his carriage as he rode by. No one put
the torch to Peter Cooper's glue factory. When on some great popular
occasion the masses assembled in the hall of Cooper Institute and its
founder came on the platform, there were many hard hands that clapped in
vigorous applause. Let the rich stretch forth toward the great masses of
England, Ireland, and America as generous and kind a hand as that of
Peter Cooper, and the age of dynamite will end. What police can not do,
and shot and shell can not do, and strongest laws severely executed can
not do, and armies can not do, will yet be accomplished by something
that I see fit to baptize as Peter Cooperism. I hail the early twilight
of that day when a man of millions shall come forth and say: "There are
seventy thousand destitute children in New York, and here I put up and
endow out of my fortune a whole line of institutions to take care of
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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