formed to. In Paris buildings are not permitted to go higher than a certain height in proportion to the widths of streets. In New York City that is entirely disregarded. In Paris it is also provided that buildings must harmonize with their surroundings. That is also disregarded here. Why, sir, we have many tall buildings that look like great packing boxes with openings on the sides, and are a disgrace to this beautiful city. I certainly hope that something will be done to restrict the excessive height to which buildings may go in this city.

THE PRESIDENT.-It is most appropriate that the Chamber should investigate this matter, and appoint a committee to report its findings in regard to the advisability of restricting the height of buildings.

The preamble and resolution were adopted.

The Chamber then adjourned.

Monthly Meeting, Thursday, April 3, 1913.

A regular monthly meeting of the Chamber of Commerce was held in the Hall of the Chamber on Thursday, April 3, 1913, at half-past twelve o'clock, P. M.

And four hundred and forty-five other members.

JAMES G. CANNON, Chairman of the Executive Committee moved that the regular order of business be suspended; that the Chamber now proceed to hold a memorial meeting in honor of the memory of J. PIERPONT MORGAN, and that when the Chamber adjourn it be to meet at 12.30 o'clock on Thursday, April 10th, to consider unfinished business.

ADDRESS OF JOHN CLAFLIN, ESQ., PRESIDENT OF THE

CHAMBER.

We come together to-day in the shadow of a great sorrow. J. PIERPONT MORGAN, for fifty years a member of this Chamber and for four terms one of its Vice-Presidents, has passed away. The greatest financier of his time, the man who, above any other, combined and embodied the American ideals of enterprise and integrity and courage, has gone from our earthly activities. Like the founders of this Nation, MR. MORGAN had prophetic vision; like them he believed in this country and in its future; like them he was an organizer of scattered possibilities and a builder of mighty structures such as no man had built before.

Those who opposed him questioned his motives, belittled his achievements and at times even strove to make his deeds of beneficence appear acts of rapacity and selfishness. The panic year of 1907 furnishes an example with which we are all familiar. It is well nigh impossible for this community to exaggerate the debt it owes to MR. MORGAN for his splendid services to public and private credit then; yet sensational criticism has often charged him with promoting the panic for his own ends. Happily the story is plain and open, and history will make it evident that he labored assiduously for months to stem the rising tide of distrust, and, when finally it became a wild flood of fear and threatened to demolish all enterprise, by an exhibition of master-will and leadership unparalleled in the annals of finance, he rallied other strong men to his side to join in untiring and constant work until their combined efforts had stayed the rush of destruction.

We, his neighbors, know what manner of man MR. MORGAN was. We knew the goodness of his heart, as well as the greatness of his mind, and it is fitting that we should assemble here to-day to do reverent honor to his memory and to bear witness to the nobility of his character and the beneficence of his life.

ADDRESS OF THE HONORABLE ELIHU ROOT, UNITED STATES SENATOR FROM NEW YORK.

MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN OF THE CHAMBER: MR. MORGAN'S life is still so near to us, the sense of loss, the half realized idea that he whom we have been meeting here and there in the daily life of the present, is to be here no more is so vivid, that discriminating estimate, is difficult.

Nevertheless, under the swift and sudden detachment of death we can already, vaguely, dimly, perceive his great career as a whole; the vigorous personality is seen against the background of tremendous forces whose play and conflict have been not merely the storm, but the development of an amazing half century of progress for civilization. When MR. MORGAN became a banker there was a different world than that in which we live. Then France was an empire. Germany was a geographical expression covering, by a reminiscence of history, twenty or more separate and independent states. America was half slave and half free. The continent was unspanned save by the emigrant wagon; no electric cable carried communication under the ocean; American banking was provincial and local; steamship and railway communication were in their infancy; the Bessemer process for making steel was not yet a success; manufacture was conducted by small units; capital was small; enterprise was individual. During his active life as a banker the most amazing development of wealth, of capacity for production, of commercial intercourse, of interchange among the nations of men, of transition from individual activity to the tremendous power of organization, the utilization of discovery and of invention, the power of leadership, all transformed the world of industry and of commerce, and are transforming the social life of the world. The transactions of to-day would have seemed impossible dreams half a century ago. The dreams have been realized in this single active life. This change has not been an invasion; it has not come from without, it has not been revolution; it has been development; it has been a growth from the latent forces that existed half a century ago.

This, our friend whom we honor and mourn to-day, was the first, the commanding and controlling figure above all other men, in this amazing movement of the forces of civilization. First among all in our own country emerging from its provincialism to its place in the great world of finance and industry, then by gradual recognition of his position here and its world influence first in the world, the greatest of bankers, the greatest organizer of production, the greatest master of commerce of the world in the mightiest epoch of power applied to finance, to production and to commerce.

How came MR. MORGAN to be this commanding figure? No title marked him for leadership to the common apprehension. No office created for him a presumption of greatness to the common apprehension. He had none of the arts of popularity. He had but little capacity for expression. In a country of speakers, of orators, of influence from the platform and of influence by the printed page, he was almost silent. It was only under stress of deep emotion that his power exhibited itself in words. The real man was hidden under a manner often gruff, always reserved. He was not a man of sentiment and expression, but a man of feeling and of action.

How came he to this leadership? He had, first of all, constructive instinct. The instinct that moved him was not to accumulate, but to He cared little for money for itself. It was what he could do

do.

with it; it was to use it for good ends and objects of interest and desire,、 not to have it. Not the instinct of the miser, but the instinct of the builder, moved him always. He had, with this constructive instinct, extraordinary intuition. He did not reason by logical processes. His mind went, straight as an arrow, to its conclusion by processes that he himself could not have explained and of which he himself was not conscious, but it went with unerring accuracy. There is a field of the higher mathematics into which no man can enter, except those rare men who come once in a century and whose minds are capable of proceeding to a distant conclusion by processes unconscious to themselves. When such a man lives his name becomes great in the history of science. Such a man in the practical affairs of life was MR. MORGAN. The same kind of intuitive process or unconscious reasoning led him from his premises to his conclusions.

With that quality he had, of course, the quality of swift decision, so that opportunity never knocked in vain at his door. At the time when all things were possible, his decision came, and he had that high courage and inflexible resolution that gave to his decision the quality of absolute finality. An incident-perhaps a necessary incidentof this extraordinary quality of the man was that he carried a touchstone for all sham and deceit and pretence, like those rings of fable or of history, which could detect the presence of poison in the cup. With little evidence he needed no argument, he needed no deliberation, but he detected the true from the false, the sound from the unsound, and reached the bedrock of a business question instantly.

Naturally, with these qualities MR. MORGAN was direct and simple and frank; never cunning or devious, never wasting his time or retarding his progress by puttering about among little things, among trifles, he always went to the main question and decided that, and then let everything else follow that.

He had far sight into the future, he had breadth of vision and largeness of mind and comprehension, so that with these great qualities he became a great figure. He had more than these. He had that imagination which could visualize that imagination without which no one, poet or banker, reasoner or builder, can be great—he had imagination and he had faith, which not only was, but gave, substance to things hoped for. Take him all and all he was a man,-a great man. And with these qualities had he not genius? I think he had. I think no ordinary talent can answer the question why MR. MORGAN attained the leadership he did. I think it was that subtle and undefinable and rare quality of genius that made him what he

was.

So he became a great leader in great affairs, and his name became a guarantee of soundness and honor and good faith and of success, so far as the exercise of inflexible resolution could produce success. He carried in his affairs the supreme capital of character. Under stress of excitement in the Pro investigation he presented the great truth of character to the wonderment and confusion of smaller minds who had been thinking upon a lower plane than he stood upon. So he found the railroad system of this country the inheritor of the fruits of fraud

and rapacity. Railroads that had been bled by their builders and managers all over the country he reconstructed upon the basis of absolute integrity, so that faith took the place of distrust and condemnation.

MR. MORGAN has been misjudged by many unfamiliar with great affairs who cannot see that big affairs proceed upon the same principles of morality as small affairs; and I would like to say-not to you in his own city who knew him, but to the people in every small town and village in our country: Select from among the people of your town the man who is most honored, the man to whom you would for advice in distress, the man whose word every one believes, the man whose example every one desires his son to follow, and in this great citizen of New York you have the man that bears the same relation of faith and honor and good report to all the great affairs of the great metropolis, and of the world of finance and commerce.

go

MR. MORGAN played no game of chance; he acquired no fortune by deceit or overreaching or unfair advantage. He took from no man, but he acquired a great fortune by making the prosperity of many and by taking his fair and just share of the prosperity that he created. The scope of his enterprise gave him a relation to public affairs that was unexampled not only in our own country, but I think in any country. There were so many investors in so many enterprises whom his chivalric sense of honor led him to desire to protect that the financial condition of the country was a matter of immediate interest to him, and he took the place that Government should have taken many and many a time. The faults of our financial system, made possible by the incapacity of lawmakers to reconcile confidence and knowledge, he remedied from time to time as occasion arose by his own tremendous power; and that was Government.

What MR. MORGAN did in the settlement of the coal strike, what he did in the Panic of 1907, was Government as truly as the leadership of a nation acquired by one commanding figure who turns it into an army for conquest, or defence, is Government. He followed the instincts of his nature which made him ready for public service wherever there was a public need appealing to his knowledge and his constructive instinct.

But there is another side of MR. MORGAN'S nature which appeals to us, and that was his kindliness and generous impulse; the capacity for loyalty to every cause he espoused, which made him a staunch Churchman, that made him a significant figure in all organizations in which we have known him, that made him a philanthropist and that made him a friend.

He was a great collector. He loved all forms of beauty. He had a sensitiveness to impressions-all the noble impressions of life that made him love association with what was great in literature, in history and in art. More than that, he had a sensitiveness to all the noblest feelings that dignify manhood which made his heart open to distress and suffering. Many men remain to be grateful to him for the preservation of their fortunes, of their investments. of the income upon which depend the comfort of their lives and the lives of