"While I have always recognized that the object of business is to make money in an honorable manner, I have endeavored to remember that the object of life is to do good. Hence I have been ready to engage in all new enterprises, and, without incurring debt, to risk in their promotion the means which I had acquired, provided they seemed to me calculated to advance the general good. This will account for my early attempt to perfect the steam engine, for my attempt to construct the first American locomotive, for my connection with the telegraph in a course of efforts to unite our country with the European world, and for my recent efforts to solve the problem of economical steam navigation on the canals; to all of which you have so kindly referred. It happens to but few men to change the current of human progress, as it did to Watt, to Fulton, to Stephenson, and to Morse; but most men may be ready to welcome laborers to a new field of usefulness, and to clear the road for their progress. "This I have tried to do, as well in the perfecting and execution of their ideas as in making such provision as my means have permitted for the proper education of the young mechanics and citizens of my native city, in order to fit them for the reception of new ideas, social, mechanical, and scientific--hoping thus to economize and expand the intellectual as well as the physical forces, and provide a larger fund for distribution among the various classes which necessarily make up the total of society. If our lives shall be such that we shall receive the glad welcome of 'Well done, good and faithful servant,' we shall then know that we have not lived in vain." For nine years after this utterance he continued the peaceful and happy life which it describes. When the end came, it was quiet and painless. Surrounded by his children and grandchildren, and whispering with almost his last breath the desire for an increase of his bequest to that other well-beloved child, the Cooper Union, he "fell on sleep," April 4, 1883. On the day of his funeral New York city presented an almost unexampled spectacle. All Soul's Unitarian Church, in which his body was deposited, early in the morning was thronged with a mighty multitude, passing in procession to look upon the beloved face. Eighteen young men from the Cooper Union surrounded it, as a guard of honor. A body of 3500 students of that institution, of both sexes, marched by, casting flowers upon the coffin, and followed by delegations from all the municipal and charitable organizations of the city, and by uncounted multitudes, whose relation to the beloved philanthropist was not official or representative, but simply personal.