Famous Givers and Their Gifts

PREFACE

While it is interesting to see how men have built up fortunes, as a rule, through industry, saving, and great energy, it is even more interesting to see how those fortunes have been or may be used for the benefit of mankind.

In a volume of this size, of course, it is impossible to speak of but few out of many who have given generously of their wealth, both in this country and abroad.

The book has been written with the hope that others may be incited to give through reading it, and may see the results of their giving in their lifetime. A sketch of George Peabody may be found in "Poor Boys who became Famous;" a sketch of Johns Hopkins in "How Success is Won."

JOHN LOWELL, Jr.,

AND HIS FREE LECTURES

There is often something pathetic about a great gift. The only son of Leland Stanford dies, and the millions which he would have inherited are used to found a noble institution on the Pacific Coast.

The only son of Henry F. Durant, the noted Boston lawyer, dies, and the sorrowing father and mother use their fortune to build beautiful Wellesley College.

The only son of Amasa Stone is drowned while at Yale College, and his father builds Adelbert College of Western Reserve University, to honor his boy, and bless his city and State.

John Lowell, Jr., early bereft of his wife and two daughters, his only children, builds a lasting monument for himself, in his Free Lectures for the People, for all time, – the Lowell Institute of Boston.

John Lowell, Jr., was born in Boston, Mass., May 11, 1799, of distinguished ancestry. His great-grandfather, the Rev. John Lowell, was the first minister of Newburyport. His grandfather, Judge John Lowell, was one of the framers of the Massachusetts Constitution in 1780. He inserted in the bill of rights the clause declaring that "all men are born free and equal," for the purpose, as he said, of abolishing slavery in Massachusetts; and offered his services to any slave who desired to establish his right to freedom under that clause. His position was declared to be constitutional by the Supreme Court of the State in 1783, since which time slavery has had no legal existence in Massachusetts. In 1781 he was elected a member of the Continental Congress, and appointed by President Washington a judge of the District Court of Massachusetts; in 1801 President Adams appointed him chief justice of the Circuit Court. He was brilliant in conversation, an able scholar, and an honest and patriotic leader. He was for eighteen years a member of the corporation of Harvard College.

Judge Lowell had three sons, John, Francis Cabot, and Charles. John, a lawyer, was prominent in all good work, such as the establishment of the Massachusetts General Hospital, the Provident Institution for Savings in the City of Boston, the Massachusetts Agricultural Society, and other helpful projects. "He considered wealth," said Edward Everett, "to be no otherwise valuable but as a powerful instrument of doing good. His liberality went to the extent of his means; and where they stopped, he exercised an almost unlimited control over the means of others. It was difficult to resist the contagion of his enthusiasm; for it was the enthusiasm of a strong, cultivated, and practical mind."

Francis Cabot, the second son, was the father of the noted giver, John Lowell, Jr. Charles, the third son, became an eminent Boston minister, and was the father of the poet, James Russell Lowell. On his mother's side the ancestors of John Lowell, Jr., were also prominent. His maternal grandfather, Jonathan Jackson, was a generous man of means, a member of the Congress of 1782, and at the close of the Revolutionary War largely the creditor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. He was the treasurer of the State and of Cambridge University.

John Lowell, Jr., must have inherited from such ancestors a love of country, a desire for knowledge, and good executive ability. He was reared in a home of comfort and intelligence. His father, Francis Cabot, was a successful merchant, a man of great energy, strength of mind, and integrity of character.

In 1810, when young John was about eleven years old, the health of his father having become impaired, the Lowell family went to England for rest and change. The boy was placed at the High School of Edinburgh, where he won many friends by his lovable qualities, and his intense desire to gain information. When he came back to America with his parents, he entered Harvard College in 1813, when he was fourteen years old. He was a great reader, especially along the line of foreign travel, and had a better knowledge of geography than most men. After two years at Cambridge, he was obliged to give up the course from ill health, and seek a more active live. When he was seventeen, and the year following, he made two voyages to India, and acquired a passion for study and travel in the East.

His father, meantime, had become deeply interested in the manufacture of cotton in America. The war of 1812 had interrupted our commerce with Europe, and America had been compelled to manufacture many things for herself. In 1789 Mr. Samuel Slater had brought from England the knowledge of the inventions of Arkwright for spinning cotton. These inventions were so carefully guarded from the public that it was almost impossible for any one to leave England who had worked in a cotton-mill and understood the process of manufacture. Parliament had prohibited the exportation of the new machinery. Without the knowledge of his parents, Samuel Slater sailed to America, carrying the complicated machinery in his mind. At Pawtucket, R.I., he set up some Arkwright machinery from memory, and, after years of effort and obstacles, became successful and wealthy.

Mr. Lowell determined to weave cotton, and if possible use the thread already made in this country. He proposed to his brother-in-law, Mr. Patrick Tracy Jackson, that they put some money into experiments, and try to make a power-loom, as this newly invented machine could not be obtained from abroad. They procured the model of a common loom, and after repeated failures succeeded in reinventing a fairly good power-loom.

The thread obtained from other mills not proving available for their looms, spinning machinery was constructed, and land was purchased on the Merrimac River for their mills; in time a large manufacturing city gathered about them, and was named Lowell, for the energetic and upright manufacturer.

When the war of 1812 was over, Mr. Lowell knew that the overloaded markets of Europe and India would pour their cotton and other goods into the United States. He therefore went to Washington in the winter of 1816, and after overcoming much opposition, obtained a protective tariff for cotton manufacture. "The minimum duty on cotton fabrics," says Edward Everett, "the corner-stone of the system, was proposed by Mr. Lowell, and is believed to have been an original conception on his part. To this provision of law, the fruit of the intelligence and influence of Mr. Lowell, New England owes that branch of industry which has made her amends for the diminution of her foreign trade; which has left her prosperous under the exhausting drain of her population to the West; which has brought a market for his agricultural produce to the farmer's door; and which, while it has conferred these blessings on this part of the country, has been productive of good, and nothing but good, to every other portion of it."

At Mr. Lowell's death he left a large fortune to his four children, three sons and a daughter, of whom John Lowell, Jr., was the eldest. Like his father, John was a successful merchant; but as his business was carried on largely with the East Indies, he had leisure for reading. He had one of the best private libraries in Boston, and knew the contents of his books. He did not forget his duties to his city. He was several times a member of the Common Council and the Legislature of the State, believing that no person has a right to shirk political responsibility.

In the midst of this happy and useful life, surrounded by those who were dear to him, in the years 1830 and 1831, when he was thirty-two years of age, came the crushing blow to his domestic joy. His wife and both children died, and his home was broken up. He sought relief in travel, and in the summer of 1832 made a tour of the Western States. In the autumn of the same year, November, 1832, he sailed for Europe, intending to be absent for some months, or even years. As though he had a premonition that his life would be a brief one, and that he might never return, he made his will before leaving America, giving about two hundred and fifty thousand dollars – half of his property – "to found and sustain free lectures," "for the promotion of the moral and intellectual and physical instruction or education of the citizens of Boston."

The will provides for courses in physics, chemistry, botany, zoölogy, mineralogy, the literature of our own and foreign nations, and historical and internal evidences in favor of Christianity.

The management of the whole fund, with the selection of lecturers, is left to one trustee, who shall choose his successor; that trustee to be, "in preference to all others, some male descendant of my grandfather, John Lowell, provided there be one who is competent to hold the office of trustee, and of the name of Lowell." The trustees of the Boston Athenæum are empowered to look over the accounts each year, but have no voice in the selection of the lecturers. "The trustee," says Mr. Lowell in his will, "may also from time to time establish lectures on any subject that, in his opinion, the wants and taste of the age may demand."

None of the money given by will is ever to be used in buildings; Mr. Lowell probably having seen that money is too often put into brick and stone to perpetuate the name of the donor, while there is no income for the real work in hand. Ten per cent of the income of the Lowell fund is to be added annually to the principal. It is believed that through wise investing the fund is already doubled, and perhaps trebled.

"The idea of a foundation of this kind," says Edward Everett, "on which, unconnected with any place of education, provision is made, in the midst of a large commercial population, for annual courses of instruction by public lectures, to be delivered gratuitously to all who choose to attend them, as far as it is practicable within our largest halls, is, I believe, original with Mr. Lowell. I am not aware that, among all the munificent establishments of Europe, there is anything of this description upon a large scale."

After Mr. Lowell reached Europe in the fall of 1832, he spent the winter in Paris, and the summer in England, Scotland, and Ireland. He was all the time preparing for his Eastern journey, – in the study of languages, and the knowledge of instruments by which to make notes of the course of winds, the temperature, atmospheric phenomena, the height of mountains, and other matters of interest in the far-off lands which he hoped to enter. Lord Glenelg, the Secretary of State for the Colonies, gave him special facilities for his proposed tour into the interior of India.

The winter of 1833 was spent in the southwestern part of France, in visiting the principal cities of Lombardy, in Nice and Genoa, reaching Florence early in February, 1834. In Rome he engaged a Swiss artist, an excellent draftsman and painter, to accompany him, and make sketches of scenery, ruins, and costumes throughout his whole journey.

After some time spent in Naples and vicinity, he devoted a month to the island of Sicily. He writes to Princess Galitzin, the granddaughter of the famous Marshal Suvorof, whom he had met in Florence: "Clear and beautiful are the skies in Sicily, and there is a warmth of tint about the sunsets unrivalled even in Italy. It resembles what one finds under the tropics; and so does the vegetation. It is rich and luxuriant. The palm begins to appear; the palmetto, the aloe, and the cactus adorn every woodside; the superb oleander bathes its roots in almost every brook; the pomegranate and a large species of convolvulus are everywhere seen. In short, the variety of flowers is greater than that of the prairies in the Western States of America, though I think their number is less. Our rudbeckia is, I think, more beautiful than the chrysanthemum coronarium which you see all over Sicily; but there are the orange and the lemon."

Mr. Lowell travelled in Greece, and July 10 reached Athens, "that venerable, ruined, dirty little town," he wrote, "of which the streets are most narrow and nearly impassable; but the poor remains of whose ancient taste in the arts exceed in beauty everything I have yet seen in either Italy, Sicily, or any other portions of Greece."

Late in September Mr. Lowell reached Smyrna, and visited the ruins of Magnesia, Tralles, Nysa, Laodicea, Tripolis, and Hierapolis. He writes to a friend in America; "I then crossed Mount Messogis in the rain, and descended into the basin of the river Hermus, visited Philadelphia, the picturesque site of Sardis, with its inaccessible citadel, and two solitary but beautiful Ionic columns."

Early in December Mr. Lowell sailed from Smyrna in a Greek brig, coasting along the islands of Mitylene, Samos, Patmos, and Rhodes, arrived in Alexandria in the latter part of the month, and proceeded up the river Nile. On Feb. 12, 1835, he writes to his friends from the top of the great pyramid: —

"The prospect is most beautiful. On the one side is the boundless desert, varied only by a few low ridges of limestone hills. Then you have heaps of sand, and a surface of sand reduced to so fine a powder, and so easily agitated by the slightest breeze that it almost deserves the name of fluid. Then comes the rich, verdant valley of the Nile, studded with villages, adorned with green date-trees, traversed by the Father of Rivers, with the magnificent city of Cairo on its banks; but far narrower than one could wish, as it is bounded, at a distance of some fifteen miles, by the Arabian desert, and the abrupt calcareous ridge of Mokattam. Immediately below the spectator lies the city of the dead, the innumerable tombs, the smaller pyramids, the Sphinx, and still farther off and on the same line, to the south, the pyramids of Abou Seer, Sakkârà, and Dashoor."

While journeying in Egypt, Mr. Lowell, from the effects of the climate, was severely attacked by intermittent, fever; but partially recovering, proceeded to Thebes, and established his temporary home on the ruins of a palace at Luxor. After examining many of its wonderful structures carved with the names and deeds of the Pharaohs, he was again prostrated by illness, and feared that he should not recover. He had thought out more details about his noble gift to the people of Boston; and, sick and among strangers, he completed in that ancient land his last will for the good of humanity. "The few sentences," says Mr. Everett, "penned with a tired hand, on the top of a palace of the Pharaohs, will do more for human improvement than, for aught that appears, was done by all of that gloomy dynasty that ever reigned."

Mr. Lowell somewhat regained his health, and proceeded to Sioot, the capital of Upper Egypt, to lay in the stores needed for his journey to Nubia. While at Sioot, he saw the great caravan of Darfour in Central Africa, which comes to the Nile once in two years, and is two or three months in crossing the desert. It usually consists of about six hundred merchants, four thousand slaves, and six thousand camels laden with ivory, tamarinds, ostrich-feathers, and provisions for use on the journey.

Mr. Lowell writes in his journal: "The immense number of tall and lank but powerful camels was the first object that attracted our attention in the caravan. The long and painful journey, besides killing perhaps a quarter of the original number, had reduced the remainder to the condition of skeletons, and rendered their natural ugliness still more appalling. Their skins were stretched, like moistened parchment scorched by the fire, over their strong ribs. Their eyes stood out from their shrunken foreheads; and the arched backbone of the animals rose sharp and prominent above their sides, like a butcher's cleaver. The fat that usually accompanies the middle of the backbone, and forms with it the camel's bunch, had entirely disappeared. They had occasion for it, as well as for the reservoir of water with which a bountiful nature has furnished them, to enable them to undergo the laborious journey and the painful fasts of the desert. Their sides were gored with the heavy burdens they had carried.

"The sun was setting. The little slaves of the caravan had just driven in from their dry pasture of thistles, parched grass, and withered herbage these most patient and obedient animals, so essential to travellers in the great deserts, and without which it would be as impossible to cross them as to traverse the ocean without vessels. Their conductors made them kneel down, and gradually poured beans between their lengthened jaws. The camels, not having been used to this food, did not like it; they would have greatly preferred a bit of old, worn-out mat, as we have found to our cost in the desert. The most mournful cries, something between the braying of an ass and the lowing of a cow, assailed our ears in all directions, because these poor creatures were obliged to eat what was not good for them; but they offered no resistance otherwise. When transported to the Nile, it is said that the change of food and water kills most of them in a little time."

In June Mr. Lowell resumed his journey up the Nile, and was again ill for some weeks. The thermometer frequently stood at 115 degrees. He visited Khartoom, and then travelled for fourteen days across the desert of Nubia to Sowakeen, a small port on the western coast of the Red Sea. Near here, Dec. 22, he was shipwrecked on the island of Dassá, and nearly lost his life. In a rainstorm the little vessel ran upon the rocks. "All my people behaved well," Mr. Lowell writes. "Yanni alone, the youngest of them, showed by a few occasional exclamations that it is hard to look death in the face at seventeen, when all the illusions of life are entire. As for swimming, I have not strength for that, especially in my clothes, and so thorough a ducking and exposure might of itself make an end of me."

Finally they were rescued, and sailed for Mocha, reaching that place on the 1st of January, 1836. Mr. Lowell was much exhausted from exposure and his recent illness. His last letters were written, Jan. 17, at Mocha, while waiting for a British steamer on her way to Bombay, India. From Mr. Lowell's journal it is seen that the steamboat Hugh Lindsay arrived at Mocha from Suez, Jan. 20; that Mr. Lowell sailed on the 23d, and arrived at Bombay, Feb. 10. He had reached the East only to die. After three weeks of illness, he expired, March 4, 1836, a little less than thirty-seven years of age. For years he had studied about India and China, and had made himself ready for valuable research; but his plans were changed by an overruling Power in whom he had always trusted. Mr. Lowell had wisely provided for a greater work than research in the East, the benefits of which are inestimable and unending.

Free public lectures for the people of Boston on the Lowell foundation were begun on the evening of Dec. 31, 1839, by a memorial address on Mr. Lowell by Edward Everett, in the Odeon, then at the corner of Federal and Franklin Streets, before two thousand persons.

The first course of lectures was on geology, given by that able scientist, Professor Benjamin Silliman of Yale College. "So great was his popularity," says Harriette Knight Smith in the New England Magazine for February, 1895, "that on the giving out of tickets for his second course, on chemistry, the following season, the eager crowds filled the adjacent streets, and crushed in the windows of the 'Old Corner Bookstore,' the place of distribution, so that provision for the same had to be made elsewhere. To such a degree did the enthusiasm of the public reach at that time, in its desire to attend these lectures, that it was found necessary to open books in advance to receive the names of subscribers, the number of tickets being distributed by lot. Sometimes the number of applicants for a single course was eight or ten thousand." The same number of the magazine contains a valuable list of all the speakers at the Institute since its beginning. The usual method now is to advertise the lectures in the Boston papers a week or more in advance; and then all persons desiring to attend meet at a designated place, and receive tickets in the order of their coming. At the appointed hour, the doors of the building where the lectures are given are closed, and no one is admitted after the speaker begins. Not long since I met a gentleman who had travelled seven miles to attend a lecture, and failed to obtain entrance. Harriette Knight Smith says, "This rule was at first resisted to such a degree that a reputable gentleman was taken to the lockup and compelled to pay a fine for kicking his way through an entrance door. Finally the rule was submitted to, and in time praised and copied."

For seven years the Lowell Institute lectures were given in the Odeon, and for thirteen years in Marlboro Chapel, between Washington and Tremont, Winter and Bromfield Streets. Since 1879 they have been heard in Huntington Hall, Boylston Street, in the Rogers Building of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Since the establishment of the free lectures, over five thousand have been given to the people by some of the most eminent and learned men of both hemispheres, – Lyell, Tyndall, Wallace, Holmes, Lowell, Bryce, and more than three hundred others. Sir Charles Lyell lectured on Geology, Professor Asa Gray on Botany, Oliver Wendell Holmes on English Poetry of the Nineteenth Century, E. H. Davis on Mounds and Earthworks of the Mississippi Valley, Lieutenant M. F. Maury on Winds and Currents of the Sea, Mark Hopkins (President of Williams College) on Moral Philosophy, Charles Eliot Norton on The Thirteenth Century, Henry Barnard on National Education, Samuel Eliot on Evidences of Christianity, Burt G. Wilder on The Silk Spider of South Carolina, W. D. Howells on Italian Poets of our Century, Professor John Tyndall on Light and Heat, Dr. Isaac I. Hayes on Arctic Discoveries, Richard A. Proctor on Astronomy, General Francis A. Walker on Money, Hon. Carroll D. Wright on The Labor Question, H. H. Boyesen on The Icelandic Saga Literature, the Rev. J. G. Wood on Structure of Animal Life, the Rev. H. R. Haweis on Music and Morals, Alfred Russell Wallace on Darwinism and Some of Its Applications, the Rev. G. Frederick Wright on The Ice Age in North America, Professor James Geikie on Europe During and after the Ice Age, John Fiske on The Discovery and Colonization of America, Professor Henry Drummond on The Evolution of Man, President Eliot of Harvard College on Recent Educational Changes and Tendencies.

Professor Tyndall, after his Lowell lectures, gave the ten thousand dollars which he had received for his labors in America in scholarships to the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard University, and Columbia College.

Mr. John Amory Lowell, a cousin of John Lowell, Jr., and the trustee appointed by him, at the suggestion of Lyell, a mutual friend, invited Louis Agassiz to come to Boston, and give a course of lectures before the Institute in 1846. He came; and the visit resulted in the building, by Mr. Abbott Lawrence, of the Lawrence Scientific School in connection with Harvard College, and the retaining of the brilliant and noble Agassiz in this country as a professor of zoölogy and geology. The influence of such lectures upon the intellectual growth and moral welfare of a city can scarcely be estimated. It is felt through the State, and eventually through the nation.

Mr. Lowell in his will planned also for other lectures, "those more erudite and particular for students;" and for twenty years there have been "Lowell free courses of instruction in the Institute of Technology," given usually in the evening in the classrooms of the professors. These are the same lectures usually given to regular students, and are free alike to men and women over eighteen years of age. These courses of instruction include mathematics, mechanics, physics, drawing, chemistry, geology, natural history, navigation, biology, English, French, German, history, architecture, and engineering. Through the generosity of Mr. Lowell, every person in Boston may become educated, if he or she have the time and desire. Over three thousand such lectures have been given.