d; the John Hay
Library at Brown University; the second Elihu Root Fund for Hamilton,
the Mrs. Cleveland Library for Wellesley, gave me pleasure to christen
after these friends. I hope more are to follow, commemorating those I
have known, liked, and honored. I also wished a General Dodge Library
and a Gayley Library to be erected from my gifts, but these friends
had already obtained such honor from their respective Alma Maters.

My first gift to Hamilton College was to be named the Elihu Root
Foundation, but that ablest of all our Secretaries of State, and in
the opinion of President Roosevelt, "the wisest man he ever knew,"
took care, it seems, not to mention the fact to the college
authorities. When I reproached him with this dereliction, he
laughingly replied:

"Well, I promise not to cheat you the next gift you give us."

And by a second gift this lapse was repaired after all, but I took
care not to entrust the matter directly to him. The Root Fund of
Hamilton[50] is now established beyond his power to destroy. Root is a
great man, and, as the greatest only are he is, in his simplicity,
sublime. President Roosevelt declared he would crawl on his hands and
knees from the White House to the Capitol if this would insure Root's
nomination to the presidency with a prospect of success. He was
considered vulnerable because he had been counsel for corporations
and was too little of the spouter and the demagogue, too much of the
modest, retiring statesman to split the ears of the groundlings.[51]
The party foolishly decided not to risk Root.

[Footnote 50: It amounts to $250,000.]

[Footnote 51: At the Meeting in Memory of the Life and Work of Andrew
Carnegie held on April 25, 1920, in the Engineering Societies Building
in New York, Mr. Root made an address in the course of which, speaking
of Mr. Carnegie, he said:

"He belonged to that great race of nation-builders who have made the
development of America the wonder of the world.... He was the
kindliest man I ever knew. Wealth had brought to him no hardening of
the heart, nor made him forget the dreams of his youth. Kindly,
affectionate, charitable in his judgments, unrestrained in his
sympathies, noble in his impulses, I wish that all the people who
think of him as a rich man giving away money he did not need could
know of the hundreds of kindly things he did unknown to the world."]

My connection with Hampton and Tuskegee Institutes, which promote the
elevation o