ntemplated
by the donor. This, with the Peabody fund, comprises a powerful agency
in working out the difficult problem of negro education.

* * * * *

The fortunes of such men as Peabody and Cornell and Hopkins and Peter
Cooper seem small enough to-day when compared with the gigantic
aggregations of money which a few men have succeeded in piling up. Not
all of them, by any means, devote their wealth to philanthropy. Here, as
in England, there are men concerned only with the idea of building up a
family and a great estate; but there are a few who have labored as
faithfully to use their wealth wisely as they did to accumulate it.

First of them is Leland Stanford, born in the valley of the Mohawk,
studying law, and moving to Wisconsin to practise it, but losing his law
library and all his property by fire, and finally joining the rush to
the newly-discovered California gold-fields, where he arrived in 1852,
being at that time twenty-eight years old. After some experience in the
mines, he decided that there were surer ways of getting gold than
digging for it, and set up a mercantile business in San Francisco, which
grew rapidly in importance and proved the foundation of a vast fortune.
He was the first president of the Central Pacific Railroad, and was in
charge of its construction over the mountains, driving the last spike at
Promontory Point, Utah, on the tenth of May, 1869. He was prominent in
the politics of state and nation, being elected to the United States
Senate in 1885.

It is not by his public life, however, that he will be remembered, for
he did nothing there that was in any way memorable, but by his gift of
twenty million dollars to found a great university at Palo Alto,
California, in memory of his only son. On May 14, 1887, the cornerstone
of this great institution was laid, and the university was formally
opened in 1891. The idea of its founder was that it should teach not
only the studies usually taught in college, but also other practical
branches of education, such as telegraphy, type-setting, type-writing,
book-keeping, and farming. This it has done, and so rapid has been its
growth, that it now has over seventeen hundred students enrolled.

After Senator Stanford's death in 1893, the university was further
endowed by his widow, Jane Lathrop Stanford, so that the present
productive funds of the university, after all of the buildings have been
paid for, amount to nearl