Wm. E. Dodge come down on all the bank stock and government
securities and railroad companies and great business houses of America!

Again, this Barzillai of the nineteenth century shows us a more sensible
way of monumental and epitaphal commemoration. It is natural to want to
be remembered. It would not be a pleasant thought to us or to any one to
feel that the moment you are out of the world you would be forgotten. If
the executors of Peter Cooper should build on his grave a monument that
would cost $20,000,000, it would not so well commemorate him as that
monument at the junction of Third and Fourth Avenues, New York. How few
people would pass along the silent sepulcher as compared with those
great numbers that will ebb and flow around Cooper Institute in the ages
to come! Of the tens of thousands to be educated there, will there be
one so stupid as not to know who built it, and what a great heart he
had, and how he struggled to achieve a fortune, but always mastered that
fortune, and never allowed the fortune to master him? What is a monument
of Aberdeen granite beside a monument of intellect and souls? What is an
epitaph of a few words cut by a sculptor's chisel beside the epitaph of
coming generations and hundreds writing his praise? Beautiful and
adorned beyond all the crypts and catacombs and shrines of the dead! But
the superfluous and inexcusable expense of catafalque and sarcophagus
and tumulus and necropolis the world over, put into practical help,
would have sent intelligence into every dark mind and provided a home
for every wanderer. The pyramids of Egypt, elevated at vast expense,
were the tombs of kings--their names now obliterated. But the monuments
of good last forever. After "Old Mortality" has worn out his chisel in
reviving the epitaphs on old tombstones, the names of those who have
helped others will be held in everlasting remembrance. The fires of the
Judgment Day will not crumble off one of the letters. The Sabbath-school
teacher builds her monument in the heavenly thrones of her converted
scholars. Geo. Mueller's monument is the orphan-houses of England.
Handel's monument was his "Hallelujah Chorus." Peabody's monument, the
library of his native village and the schools for educating the blacks
in the South. They who give or pray for a church have their monument in
all that sacred edifice ever accomplishes. John Jay had his monument in
free America. Wilberforce his monument in the piled up chains