s and other unprofitable places. If
he could provide a place where these young men could find entertainment
and opportunity to improve their minds, it would be a great gain. Peter
Cooper thought that we are educated through the sense of curiosity quite
as much as in reading books. So Cooper Union provided a museum of
waxworks and many strange, natural-history specimens. There was also an
art-gallery, a collection of maps and statuary; and a lecture-hall was
placed in the basement of the building. Peter Cooper had once seen a
panic occur in a hall located on a second story and the people fell over
one another in a mass on the stairway. He said a panic was not likely to
occur going upstairs. This hall is a beautiful and effective
assembly-room, even yet. It seats nineteen hundred people, and the
audience so surrounds the speaker that it does not impress one as being
the vast auditorium which it is.

Cooper Union has always been the home of free speech. Next to Faneuil
Hall it is the most distinguished auditorium in America, from a historic
standpoint.

William Cullen Bryant, Edward Everett, Henry Ward Beecher, Wendell
Phillips, and every great speaker of the time, spoke here. Victoria
Woodhull brought much scandal on the devoted head of Peter Cooper when
he allowed her to use the platform to ventilate her peculiar views.
Peter Cooper met the criticism by inviting her to come back and speak
again. She did so, being introduced by Theodore Tilton. Here came
Lincoln, the gaunt and homely, and spoke before he was elected
President. His "Cooper Union Speech" is a memorable document, although
it was given without notes and afterwards written out by Lincoln, who
seemed surprised that any one should care to read it.

The speech given in Cooper Union by Robert G. Ingersoll lifted him from
the rank of a Western lawyer to national prominence in a single day.
Other men had criticized the Christian religion, but no man of power on
a public platform had up to that time in America expressed his
abhorrence and contempt for it. The reputation of Ingersoll had preceded
him. He had given his lecture in Peoria, then in Chicago, and now he
made bold to ask Peter Cooper for permission to use the historic hall.
Cooper responded with eagerness. There was talk of a mob when the papers
announced an "infidel speech."

The auspicious night came, and Peter Cooper himself introduced the
speaker. He sat on the platform during the address, at times a