their families. Many men, multitudes, remain to thank him for bringing to his own land, and helping to build up opportunity for the people to see, the great works of art of other countries and of other times, to thank him for that enlargement of human happiness that after men have drunken and eaten all they can and have worn all the clothes and found all the shelter they can, comes from the cultivation of taste. Many men remain to be grateful for his example of integrity and honor, and many men and women, to bless him for the good done in secret. Many a tear has been shed in homes of which I know for the loss of the simple-minded modest benefactor who has done good in secret.

The era of development in which he lived and worked is drawing to its conclusion. Such a career as his may, and probably will never come again, for we come to other days and other manners, but the great-heartedness, the nobility of the man, thank God! are eternal, and will live with us and in his example, time without end.

ADDRESS OF THE HONORABLE JOSEPH H. CHOATE, FORMER AMBASSADOR TO GREAT BRITAIN.

MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN.--When MR. MORGAN, in that examination at Washington to which MR. ROOT has referred, to which he looked forward with so much dread, and from which he emerged with so much glory, said that" character is the true secret of all success in life." he wrote his own epitaph, and told in one short sentence the whole story of his life.

This pure, high, unselfish character, seemed to be inherent and transmissible in the noble stock from which he sprang. I am afraid few of you remember his glorious immediate, ancestors whom I had the honor of seeing and knowing as a young man knows the old. There was his maternal grandfather, JOHN PIERPONT, for whom he was named; a grand old hero and patriot, if there ever was one; a man who though 76 years old when the Civil War broke out, yet took the field as chaplain in one of the Massachusetts regiments; a man who was always a noble champion for his country and especially for freedom. Are there any men here, I wonder, who were present on the 22d of December, 1855, so long ago, when JOHN PIERPONT delivered that noble poem before the New England Society in DR. CHEEVER'S church on Union Square, which stood on the spot afterwards occupied for many years by the golden temple of TIFFANY? If there are, then they must remember the splendid stanzas which he delivered on that night, which were inspiring to the very last degree. I recall the grand invocation to the God of the Pilgrims with which he concluded.

"O! Thou Holy One and Just,
Thou who wast the Pilgrims' trust,
Thou who watchest o'er their dust,

By the moaning sea;

By their conflicts, toils and tears;
By their perils and their prayers,
By their ashes,

Make their heirs true

To Them and Thee."

That prayer was not uttered in vain, and this one heir, this one grandson of his whom we have met to-day to commemorate the secret of his life was that he was true to the principles that he had inherited from his sires and from the God in whose sight he always felt that he was moving and working. It was indeed a great thing to be descended from such a man as good old JOHN PIERPONT and to bear his

name.

And then his own father, JUNIUS SPENCER MORGAN—a man whose career and character were singularly like his own. Entering life as a clerk in a store in Boston, moving on by the pure force of character and conduct step by step, year by year, decade by decade, until he became a partner with, and successor to, GEORGE PEABODY, and, like him, one of the noblest and grandest merchants and bankers of London. I am one of those who believe that the stuff that is born in a man contributes quite as much to his success in life, as what he himself acquires and achieves.

Thus MR. MORGAN had certainly a most noble inheritance to begin with. I knew him first when he had just returned from school and the university in Germany and was a clerk in the office, I believe, of DUNCAN, SHERMAN & COMPANY; and from that day on until the day that he laid down his life in Rome, it was one continuous, steady, unbroken march of progress from strength to strength and always from glory to glory. When I look around upon this great company of the active merchants and bankers of to-day, and when I gaze upon these walls from which look down upon us the portraits of the great merchants and bankers of past generations, MR. MORGAN and his father included among them, and ask how it was that he towered above all the rest, so that every man in this generation, and the spirits of these departed would agree that he was greater than them all, I attribute it not merely to his inherited noble character, but to the wonderful God given qualities of mind and body that few men in any generation are blessed with. MR. MORGAN had truly not only a sound mind in a sound body, but he had a colossal mind, and as penetrating and subtle as it was colossal, in a very wonderful body. He had a genius for finance and for great affairs, and seemed to me to reach his conclusions by intuition; not by study. I do not think he could himself have reasoned out to you the processes by which his great conclusions were reached. No problem could be submitted to him which he was not equal to, and to which he did not give, by the closest attention, the most successful solution of which it was capable.

It is only once in a generation that such a mind is born in such a a body, and MR. MORGAN made the very best use of it from his first entrance into the banking house in 1857 until he died in 1913. And then he had certain other qualities which all may hope to have, but which he developed in a wonderful degree; and I should say that the first of these was loyalty loyalty to his country, loyalty to all his associates, loyalty to every enterprise in which he had engaged, and, above all, loyalty to himself-to his own noble conscience and to the great character of which he was the owner.

Truly he exemplified the words of SHAKSPERE:

"This above all,-to thine own self be true;
And it must follow as the night the day,
Thou can'st not then be false to any man."

He was always true to himself, and, therefore, as you all know, he was never once false to any man. And then besides all that greatness of mind and body and character, under that same rugged exterior, he had one of the warmest, tenderest, most sympathetic hearts that ever beat within the breast of man.

I shall not dwell upon any of those points explanatory of his great financial career to which MR. ROOT has done such noble justice, but I do want to say one word about that great heart within that great body and under the dome of that great head. It was one of the noblest of which I think biography or history gives us any example. I think that of him more signally than of any great man that I ever knew, we might say even in his sternest moods,

"He hides a smiling providence behind a frowning face."

His relations to his fellow men were full of sacred and sympathetic kindness.

I do not believe that he ever worked for money as the chief object of life. Money to him was a means rather than an end, to see how much good he could do with it, how far he could make the blessing of what he acquired extend to other men and women. That is what he was always in search of. If the great mass and number of his gifts through his seventy-five years could be recorded and accounted for-and I do not think he ever kept any ledger account showing what he gave awayit would be, I believe a colossal fortune bevond the dreams of avarice, approximating perhaps that which he has left behind him.

He was the man who led the way in all works of benevolence, of charity and of good conduct, building up great institutions for public welfare, hospitals, churches, universities, colleges, schools, and these not limited to his own immediate vicinity. No appeal for a good cause came to him in vain.

So I fear that that story will never be told in full, but we know enough about it to know that he took infinite pleasure in the good that he could accomplish in the world by aiding the struggles, and mitigating the miseries, of his fellowmen and women. If that company of his beneficiaries who were made mourners by his death could be gathered together and march in procession before us, it would astound the world. And the number of homes, that by his unseen benevolence he has saved from suffering and made happy, could not be counted within the score or within the hundred.

Yet this great man, who was as good as he was great-and that is what makes him greater still-this man who was such a patriot, such a lover of his country, such a constant benefactor of his race, was subjected often to the most serious calumny.

"Be thou as chaste as ice, as cold as snow, thou shalt not escape calumny."

Nobody ever found that more true than this great American, especially during the last twenty years of his life, when he was trying, with all the ardor and vigor that was in him, to benefit his fellow-citizens and the world at large. It was instigated largely for political purposes, and also by malicious rivalry, but so confident was he always of his own rectitude, so sure was all the rest of the world of his absolute purity and uprightness of character that it all slid away from him and did him no harm whatever.

I must not occupy any more of your time. The men whose portraits are looking down upon us from these walls, and you in your counting houses and stores, will unite with me, in saying that though we can not attain to his dimensions, we must each according to his mediocrity, strive to imitate his example. We must try to be as good and pure, as true and patriotic, as benevolent and humane as he was; and we must leave his memory as I think it may be safely left, to the judgment of an impartial posterity.

ADDRESS OF ROBERT W. DE FOREST, ESQ., VICE-PRESIDENT
OF THE METROPOLITAN

MUSEUM OF ART.

MR. PRESIDENT.-To those who only looked at MR. MORGAN from a single angle, whatever that angle was, he loomed so large that they thought they saw his whole stature. But from whatever point he was viewed there could only be seen a small fraction of his great personality.

To the world of business he seemed the embodiment of some titanic force, whether it operated to save the credit of a nation or to re-create a great enterprise.

To such a world it must have seemed inconceivable that this same person could halt his great business projects to admire some small work of art, and could lay aside both business and arts to play with his grandchildren, or to caress his favorite dog.

But such was the real MR. MORGAN. And to him it was not incongruous to assemble the forces which stayed the panic of 1907 for that famous all-night session at his Library in the company of a placid MADONNA of RAPHAEL and a delicate statuette by DONATELLO. There were two of DONATELLO's statuettes in his favorite corner. loved them, he was wont to say, because they reminded him of his own children.

He

He was easily the greatest art amateur,—the greatest art collector, of his time.

Was it the mere pleasure of possession, the ambition to have and be known to have the choicest objects of art, which attracted him? No, not primarily, though such pleasure and such ambition there must have been. He loved art for art's sake. His taste was highly cultivated and he rarely erred. He trusted his own judgment in selection, and his mental operation was as intuitive and instantaneous when

applied to the purchase of a picture as to a business transaction. I recall several instances:

ear.

I was with him in London at the establishment of a noted dealer. The dealer took from his pocket a miniature and said to MR. MORGAN: "You want that for your collection." MR. MORGAN glanced at it for a second. "How much did you pay for it?" said he. The dealer, who evidently mistrusted me, whispered something in MR. MORGAN'S MR. MORGAN handed the miniature back to him at once. A little later at the same interview the dealer took out another miniature. Said he, How about this one MR. MORGAN?" The same quick pantomine was enacted, and MR. MORGAN put the miniature in his pocket. I was admiring an exquisite Gothic statuette in his library. I said, "MR. MORGAN, how did you possibly get that?" "Why," said he, "I was walking on a street of Paris; I passed a man carrying something under his cloak and I saw that he had a statue. I asked him what he was doing with it. He said he wanted to sell it. I took him to my hotel and in five minutes I became its owner." Later his expert friends told him he had obtained a masterpiece at an insignificant price.

He frequently paid large prices. He used to say "No price is too large for an object of unquestioned beauty and known authenticity." And he acted on this belief. No wonder he vexed the souls of amateurs whose purses were more slender, and excited the envy of museum directors whose government grants were insufficient to compete with him. But now that he has brought all these acquired treasures to his and our own country, which one of us will say that his was not the broader perspective?

MR. MORGAN was interested in our Metropolitan Museum from the very beginning. He was one of that courageous band of publicspirited citizens who worked for a year to raise the pitiful $106,000 with which it was started. He became a trustee in 1889 and was elected President in 1904. From then it became with him an absorbing interest. He would drop any piece of business at any time to give thought to its affairs. I have frequently in these later years called him up by telephone to inquire when he could see me conveniently about something, and his almost invariable response was "right now.'

I recall the Monday of that famous all-night session which stayed the Panic of 1907. He quietly presided over a long meeting at the Museum that afternoon, and only after its routine was all over did he quietly remark that he had to hurry home to attend to a serious financial situation.

Nor was his interest in the Museum solely that of a collector. He found in the re-organization which took place when he became its President ample scope for his broad, perspective, constructive power. He was in deep sympathy with its recent development on the side of industrial art and education. Nor did he ever look upon it as a private possession. It was as a great public institution that it appealed to him. Nothing pleased him more than the true democracy of those recent receptions where he stood at the head of the receiving line and shook hands with everyone who filed by.