f he have a second
wife, the children of the first wife will charge him with being unduly
influenced. Many a man who, when he made his will, had more brain than
all his household put together, has been pronounced a fit subject for a
lunatic asylum. Be your own executor. Do not let the benevolent
institutions of the country get their chief advantage from your last
sickness and death. How much better, like Peter Cooper, to walk through
the halls you have built for others and see the young men being educated
by your beneficence, and to get the sublime satisfaction of your own
charities! I do not wonder that Barzillai, the wealthy Gileadite, lived
to be eighty, for he stood in the perpetual sunshine of his beneficence.
I do not wonder that Peter Cooper, the modern Barzillai, lived to be
ninety-two years of age, for he felt the healthful reaction of helping
others. Doing good was one of the strongest reasons of his longevity.
There is many a man with large estate behind him who calls up his past
dollars as a pack of hounds to go out and hunt up one more dollar before
he dies. Away away the hunter and his hounds for that last dollar!
Hotter and hotter the chase. Closer on the track and closer. Whip up and
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