Chapter IV: Part 4

To protect the supply of coal which his vast steel manufacture now required, in 1889 Carnegie joined forces with Henry C. Frick, who dominated the coke-making industry. As a result, his companies soon “owned and controlled mines producing 6,000,000 tons of ore annually; 40,000 acres of coal land, and 12,000 coke ovens; steamship lines for transporting ore to Lake Erie ports; docks for handling ore and coal, and a railroad from Lake Erie to Pittsburgh; 70,000 acres of natural-gas territory, with 200 miles of pipe-line; nineteen blast furnaces and five steel mills, producing and finishing 3,250,000 tons of steel annually. The pay-roll of the year exceeded $18,000,000.”

Gradually consolidating his interests, Carnegie formed in 1890, the Carnegie Company, with a paid up capital of $160,000,000, and in 1899 his interests were merged into the Carnegie Steel Company. Although still as active in affairs as ever, Carnegie now determined to retire from active business. In an address delivered at Pittsburgh he gave his reasons. “An opportunity to retire from business came to me unsought, which I considered it my duty to accept. My resolve was made in youth to retire before old age. From what I have seen around me, I cannot doubt the wisdom of this course, although the change is great, even serious, and seldom brings happiness. But this is because so many, having abundance to retire upon, have so little to retire to. I have always felt that old age should be spent, not as the Scotch say, in ‘making mickle mair,’ but in making good use of what has been acquired; and I hope my friends will approve of my action in retiring while still in full health and vigor, and I can reasonably expect many years of usefulness in fields which have other than personal aims.”

The “opportunity” to which Carnegie referred was the merging, in 1901, of the Carnegie Steel Company into the United States Steel Corporation. For his personal interest Carnegie received $420,000,000.

Freed from business, the iron-master turned to follow the paths to which his idealism had constantly called him. Always a reader and a student of books, he now found himself able to make, through public libraries, books everywhere available, and in various cities and towns he contributed for library buildings more than $60,000,000. Still further to advance education and bring its advantages to all who sought it, he made other gifts, consisting of $24,000,000 to the Institute at Pittsburgh, $22,000,000 to the Carnegie Institute in Washington, and $10,000,000 to the Universities of Scotland. At the time of his death in 1919, it was estimated that he had given away to education and other worthy causes over $350,000,000.

Behind this generous distribution of his great wealth was a desire to distribute his fortune before his death. “The day is not far distant,” he once said, “when the man who dies leaving behind him available wealth which was free to him to administer during life, will pass away ‘unwept, unhonored and unsung,’ no matter to what use he leaves the dross that he cannot take away with him. Of such the public verdict will be: ‘The man who dies thus rich, dies disgraced.’”

Many other worthy causes held Carnegie’s interest from his retirement from business to his death. Of all his public activities, he took perhaps greatest interest in the cause of world peace. He believed in arbitration instead of war, and aided in the organization of various leagues and commissions to that end.

But although Carnegie was one of the world’s most generous givers he had no desire to abolish poverty. “We should,” he said, “be quite willing to abolish luxury, but to abolish honest, industrious, self-denying poverty would be to destroy the soil upon which mankind produces the virtues which enable our race to reach a still higher civilization than it now possesses.” Not to help men were his millions given, but to help men to help themselves. In his long list of philanthropies, education is the goal. “Nothing for the submerged,” was his motto; but for the boy or man who honestly strove to force his way upward Carnegie would give all.

During the latter years of his life honors came to him. He was made Lord Rector of the University of St. Andrews, Edinburgh, in 1903, and received from the same university the degree of Doctor of Laws in 1905. In 1907 France made him a Commander of the Legion of Honor, and in the same year the Queen of Holland conferred on him the Order of Orange-Nassau. By his adopted country he was held in high regard, and among other honors was made an honorary alumnus of the University of Princeton.

Simple, as his parents had been before him, in spite of his vast wealth which opened the world to him, Carnegie desired that the world should know his pride in his own hard struggle and in the poverty of his birth. On the crest which he designed for himself is a weaver’s shuttle, indicating his father’s occupation, and there is a coronet turned upside down, surmounted by a liberty cap, and supported by American and Scots flags. The motto is “Death to Privilege.” To radical minds there is food for thought in this strange crest and its motto, for they who cry death to privilege often mean death to ambition, and without ambition the son of the weaver would never have become the world benefactor who made himself able to give wealth by the hundreds of millions for the good of humanity.

On the day following his death, in the summer of 1919, a great New York newspaper began an account of his life with these paragraphs, a final tribute to an American by adoption:—

“Andrew Carnegie, the outstanding figure of nineteenth-century industrialism, will go down through the ages as the very personification of ‘Triumphant Democracy.’

“Overcoming almost insuperable obstacles by his unusual energy and sheer tenacity of purpose, Andrew Carnegie rose from a humble messenger-boy to wealth beyond the dreams of avarice. He rose from obscurity to a unique position in the world.

“Yet despite the tremendous effort put into everything he undertook, Andrew Carnegie’s meteoric rise was due entirely to the opportunity offered to all in a land of freedom and of free speech. This fact he emphasized in all his writings, and in all his speeches. Moreover, it had a profound effect upon the course he adopted for the administration of his vast fortune, for the development of mankind, and the furtherance of science.”

VII

JAMES J. HILL

_Born near Guelph, Ontario, Canada, 1837_
_Died in St. Paul, Minnesota, 1916_

A hundred years ago Napoleon, with the sword, carved out of Europe an empire. To accomplish this, the lives of men by the thousand were sacrificed. With misery and bloodshed its boundaries were extended, and in a few years it had vanished into the history of the past. In like manner, for centuries have men of dominance changed the maps of the world, with armies and the sword.

But within the memory of men who live to-day another kind of empire-builder gave to the new world an empire of another kind. With peace and prosperity, year by year, he developed its vast square miles of territory. With rails of steel he pushed its boundaries each year still further into the wilderness. Each year he opened up to the world new acres of fertile fields, rich mines, and the tremendous natural resources of a virgin country. It is an empire that time can never destroy. It is an empire that has brought prosperity to the world.

All this was done by a poor Canadian boy, born in a log-cabin at the edge of the forest in the Province of Ontario, in the year 1837. James Jerome Hill was his name.

_Copyright by Pach Brothers_

_Jas. J. Hill_ (signature)]

On his mother’s side the boy inherited the sturdy characteristics of Scotch ancestry; on his father’s side he found the brilliance and spirit of the Irish race. The soil was the sole source of their livelihood. Born in a wilderness where dark forests still sheltered wolves and deer, and where the Indians still roamed, the boy, from earliest childhood, received impressions that moulded his life’s destiny. He was born to see man subdue the wilderness, to see his struggle with the forces of primitive nature, to see his inevitable victory. As his own father hewed his few acres from the forest, so in the coming years was James J. Hill to redeem vast wilderness territories and give them to the use of man.

Characteristically, the father’s foresight sought more than an ordinary frontier education for his eldest son; and with equal eagerness the boy grasped at the opportunities that were offered him. At eleven he left the little district school where his education had begun, and entered an academy in a nearby village, conducted by an Englishman of college education.

There were no libraries, and in that remote outskirt of civilization newspapers were rarely seen. But a few books in the Hill household gave the growing boy an insight into literature, and the long hours of out-of-door labor which filled that part of the day when he was not at school developed him physically and gave him a foundation of good health which in later years made possible his tireless energy.

When he was fourteen his father died, and realizing the responsibilities which were now resting on his shoulders, the boy gave up his hope of a professional career and for four years supported his mother and her household with such small wages as he earned as clerk in the village store.

For several years, in the imaginative brain of the boy had grown the hope of some day crossing the Western plain and sailing across the Pacific to the Orient. Eagerly he had read all he could find that told him of those far countries. To his imagination they seemed to hold a definite promise of opportunity. He had but little money; but he had faith in himself and in his future. Each year the longing grew until, when he was eighteen, he could stand it no more and his new life began.

Without money, friends, or influence, he crossed the boundary into the United States, and after visiting several of the large Eastern cities, made his way to St. Paul, then a small town situated at the head of navigable water on the Mississippi River. North and west the unbroken prairie and the forests were peopled only by the Indians; buffalo roamed the prairies. Only along the navigable rivers were the cultivated farm-lands of the settlers.

The young man had no money; it was necessary for him to devote himself for a time to some profitable occupation. He was eighteen years old, but he was willing to turn his hand to any honest work, and his vivid imagination inspired him to work hard so that his future hopes might be realized. All of the business activity of St. Paul centred on the levees along the river, where merchandise brought up the Mississippi by boat was unloaded for shipment by ox-teams to the outlying settlements.

Hill was attracted by this kind of business. The position of shipping clerk in the office of the agents of a steamboat company was open, and he grasped it. The work was varied: he received incoming and outgoing freight, ran the warehouse, inspected its contents, kept an open eye for new business, and when labor was scarce, helped the men load and unload the steamboats. On this early experience was to be built the great triumph of coming years.

Not content with performing well his daily work, young Hill spent his evenings largely in studying the more technical and theoretical aspects of the transportation business and the possibilities, dependent upon adequate transportation, of the development of the great unexplored Northwest. Moreover, he saved his money, realizing that a time would come when his savings, however small, might prove vital to the grasping of an opportunity.

The year 1864 marks the close of the second period of his education. The great Civil War had torn the country. Hill, eager to serve his adopted land, had tried to enlist; but an accident in childhood which had resulted in the loss of an eye made it impossible to pass the physical examination. Although just beyond his majority, the boy had become a man in more than years. His steady attention to his work and the long hours of study had put him into a position from which he could now step fearlessly forward. He was a man of affairs.

The practical business knowledge and the business relationships which he had formed made him desire to be more completely his own master. It was not that he was tired of clerking; it was rather that he realized that the time had come to strike out for himself. To this resolve his young wife, Mary Theresa Mehegan, whom he had married in 1864, lent all her power of love and encouragement. A true partner in all her husband’s plans, Mrs. Hill shared every struggle along the path of success.

The young business man became interested in many things. Far to the north was the great Red River country, and he began to identify himself with the traffic which was carried on between this territory and St. Paul. He developed his warehouse business; he became a dealer in salt, coal, cement, and lime; he transferred freight, and, above all, he studied the developments of railroading, with a realization that in the freight-car and the locomotive was the secret of the transportation of the future. Fuel particularly interested him, for he believed that, as the railroad train would supersede the steamboat, so would coal supplant wood as a motive power.

A year after resigning his clerkship, he entered into the first of the many partnerships which he formed during his life. His savings were now an asset of real value, and the $2500 which he had put by made the partnership possible. The partners planned to do a general transportation, commission, and storage business, and in 1866 he began his enlarged activities.

The following year Hill secured a contract with the St. Paul and Pacific Railroad Company to supply it with fuel. It was his first real introduction to the railroad business, and on it were based the labors and successes of the coming years. The railroad in the Northwest was still in its infancy; transportation depended largely on the rivers and lakes.

During the next few years, Hill studied the transportation problems of the Northwest with constantly increasing faith in his belief that, by means of adequate transportation, it was possible speedily to develop this vast region for the use of man. More and more the idea appealed to him. His romantic vision led him on in his thoughts far beyond the boundaries which surrounded the mental vision of his fellow citizens, and his years of study and varied business experience enabled him, step by step, to turn his dreams into realities.

Steadily the railroads had extended westward from the Great Lakes. The end of the Mississippi River transportation was within sight. But from St. Paul to the rich lands of the Red River only the clumsy carts and the lake flatboats carried the merchandise which the settlers required. Present needs of adequate transportation were great; future requirements were enormous beyond comprehension. Hill went into the problem, and soon had a regular line of boats, carts, and steamers operating between St. Paul and Winnipeg. The empire-maker had begun to build.

Many are the stories that are told of Mr. Hill in those early days. In the heat of summer and in the blizzards of the northern winters he personally inspected and carried forward the work which he had designed. He endured every kind of hardship. On his steamboats in the open months, and with sled and dog train in winter, he passed back and forth over the route, examining every local condition, studying the soil, the climate, and the mineral deposits along the way.

On one late winter trip, when the bitter winds were sweeping across the snowy prairies, blotting out every landmark and turning the country into a vast white sea, he started north with dogs and sleds, and an Indian guide for a companion. After a few days the nerve of the Indian began to weaken and he urged that they turn back. Realizing that unless decided action was promptly taken the Indian might be dangerous, Hill ordered him to return, and set out again alone, camping by night among the snow-drifts, making tea with melted snow, and sleeping wrapped in his blankets, with his dogs close about him.

The first railroad actually to be constructed into this new territory was the St. Paul and Pacific. It received its charter in 1858, under the name of the Minnesota & Pacific Railroad Company, and was planned to extend from Stillwater, through St. Paul and Minneapolis, west to Breckenridge. Immediately a craze for railroads swept the Northwest, and numbers of companies were formed; but such frenzied speculation could end only in disaster, and one by one the companies fell into bankruptcy.

With anxious eyes Hill watched the rising and waning fortunes of these various railroad enterprises. His investigation led him to believe that the St. Paul & Pacific offered the greatest possibilities. For seventeen long years he worked hard, dreamed his dreams, and added to his capital. Then came the opportunity. The St. Paul & Pacific had become a wrecked property. In it he saw the possibilities for which he had worked and saved. With a clear realization of the tremendous step that he was taking, he cast his entire fortune into the balance, and with the assistance of several associates took over the property, and with it its enormous debt of over $33,000,000. James J. Hill at last held control of a railroad.

He had bought a property that was bankrupt and was described as “two streaks of rust reaching out into the desert”; but in this bold beginning was the germ of the great railroad system which, under the name of the Great Northern, was to bring him fame and fortune in the years to come.

In the six years that followed, Mr. Hill extended his railroad to the Red River and connected with the government line from Winnipeg. By this extension the rich lands of Minnesota were opened to immigrants, and the great wheat-lands of the Northwest were connected with the markets of the United States.

The risk that he had taken was justified; but to his wife and to the friends who knew him it seemed less great, for they knew the character of the man, and to know him was to feel complete confidence in any action which he determined to take. “All his life it was his custom to know all the facts about anything in which he was interested, a good deal earlier and a little better than anybody else. For twenty years he had lived in the country where the situation had been preparing. For four or five years he had been consumed with anxiety to get possession of this property. He alone fully understood its present value; he alone conceived its future with any degree of justness.”

But now his dreams of a greater empire began to be realized. The St. Paul & Pacific, under his able management, was earning money and building up a surplus. In 1883 Mr. Hill extended it to Helena, Montana. And now his belief in the development of the Northwest was more strongly confirmed with each new step. His vision already pictured a railroad stretching across the prairies and over the tremendous barrier of the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific and the great harbors of Puget Sound. This was no impractical dream, but an idea founded on fact and experience; it was a great constructive enterprise.

Ten years later, in 1893, Mr. Hill began actively to carry out his plan of extending his railroad from Helena to the coast. It is hard to realize the tremendous difficulties which faced him. On the one hand, the Rocky Mountains seemed to block his path; on the other, a financial panic made the obtaining of the money necessary for the project seem almost an impossibility. But he was undismayed; every obstacle was overcome, the road was built, and the empire again extended its boundary, this time to the blue waters of the Pacific.

Following the completion of the Great Northern, as the consolidation of his various railroads was now called, to Puget Sound, Mr. Hill began his struggle to obtain the control of other railroads in order to combine them all into one vast coherent system. The Northern Pacific Railroad was the first to be added, and then the Burlington System was secured and incorporated into the vast development of his plan. Fifty years before, the penniless country boy had left the small village of his birth to seek his fortune; and now, after this life of usefulness, he found himself able to pay in cash over $200,000,000 for the Northern Pacific Railway System.

Mr. Hill believed that the tilling of the soil was the true basis of success; that on the soil rested the stability of government, and that from it came the wealth of the world. To him, his vast systems of railroads were the means of opening to settlement regions of arable land, and later, when these lands had been cultivated, of connecting them with the rest of the world and affording markets for their produce. To increase population and industry along a railroad was the surest way of making the railroad profitable. He believed that a railroad would be rich or poor along with the farmers who cultivated the fields beside its tracks.

In order to help the thousands of farmers along the lines of his railroads to make their farms more profitable, Mr. Hill bought, wherever in the world they could be best obtained, herds of the finest cattle. These he bred on his own farms, and many he gave away to the farmers for their own breeding. In all, he gave away more than eight thousand head of cattle and hogs, and for many years offered prizes for the best cattle raised by the farmers. “We must have better farming,” he said. “We must have more intelligent methods. Experience has shown that there is no way in which they can do this so well as by raising cattle, pigs, and horses, and by dairying.”

As a boy he had dreamed of the Orient. Now his dreams were to be realized. From the Western states his trains came eastward heavily loaded with lumber from the great forests of Oregon and Washington. To operate most profitably, it was apparent that these trains should not go west empty, but filled with merchandise. But there were not enough people in these Western states to consume the merchandise the trains could carry. Beyond the Pacific, however, were millions of people. China and Japan needed many things. Why should not his railroads carry westward merchandise for these great markets of the Orient?

With characteristic thoroughness, Mr. Hill sent agents to China to study the food-problem, and the best way to make a market there for American flour. They reported the existence of a great market for flour, cotton, and steel. To gain this business was to wage industrial warfare with Belgium and Great Britain, who had a cheap all-water route to the Orient by way of the Suez Canal.

But as his railroads extended only to the Pacific shore, a great ocean still lay between him and these alluring markets. To solve this problem, Mr. Hill formed, in 1900, the Great Northern Steamship Company, and built the Minnesota and the Dakota, the greatest vessels ever built flying the American flag, to run between Seattle and Yokohama and Hong Kong. But in this great venture, with its promise of success, Mr. Hill encountered disappointment, for the policy of the United States was unfavorable, rates and regulations made the cost of the operation of the ships excessive, and he was at last forced by circumstances to withdraw from the Oriental field.

Meanwhile, the vast empire of the Northwest was rapidly filling up with settlers. In a single year eighteen thousand farmers located along the Great Northern, and each year, farther and farther back from the tracks, new lands were developed and new homes were located where only a few years before the buffalo and the Indians had wandered. Next after the railroad, it was the farm which held the closest interest of the empire-builder.

Second only to Mr. Hill’s belief in the farm as the foundation of national prosperity was his interest in the discovery and development of new sources of mineral wealth. As a young man he had recognized the tremendous part which coal was to play in the history of transportation and the consequent development of the country. For years he had studied the coal deposits of the Northwest, and there was probably no one better informed than he regarding their quality, extent, and location.

In like manner he had investigated the general facts regarding the world’s supply of iron ore. At this time, however, there were no known deposits of iron ore in the Northwest. Then came rumors of the discovery of iron deposits in northern Minnesota. But now Mr. Hill’s two oldest sons were taking an active interest in the vast operations of their father. Like him, they had traveled extensively, not only over the territory reached by his railroads, but also over the still undeveloped lands, particularly in northern Minnesota.

In this way the two younger men became convinced of the wealth of iron ore which awaited only proper development and railroad connections to yield an enormous profit. Mr. Hill saw also the great opportunity that presented itself, and in 1899 personally purchased, for $4,050,000, a great tract of land on the now famous Mesabi Range. Immediately, railroad connections with the iron country were constructed, and arrangements for the shipment of the ore over the Great Northern were made. But although this was in every respect a private venture, practically discovered and entirely paid for by Mr. Hill out of his own pocket, his high sense of honor and responsibility refused to accept the enormous profits which were soon to be realized. Believing that the stockholders of the Great Northern, who with their money had stood behind him and had in a measure made this new development possible, were entitled to a share in the profits, he organized this new mining project, and distributed its stock, share for share, among them in proportion to their investment in the railroad. His refusal to take the entire profit is a fine example of the high principles which guided his every act and were in large measure responsible for his success.

Throughout his life, Mr. Hill believed that the success of men and nations rests entirely on the truest personal liberty. To him the man was always bigger than the state. Personal initiative and effort came first; what man individually could not accomplish, that the state must do; but never should the state assume the development or operation of a project until it was recognized that an individual or a group of individuals could not better accomplish the desired result.

The forest, the farm, and the mines, were in his belief the three sources of wealth. But wealth could come only from universal industry, honesty, thrift, and fair dealing among men. In his own dealings with his fellow men, he required those qualities; and, although his keen sympathies invariably responded to true distress, he had scant patience with those whose false vision saw in wealth honestly acquired a fund to be drawn upon for the support of the lazy and shiftless.

He once said: “There are four great words that should be written upon the four corner-stones of every public building in the country, with the sacredness of a religious rite. These watchwords of the Republic are Equality, Simplicity, Economy, and Justice.” And another time he said, when speaking of a profit-sharing arrangement he had made with his employees: “I am as well satisfied with that institution as with anything I have ever had to do with. I think that its greatest value is teaching the men to save. The first two or three hundred dollars is the hardest to save, but when once you have started, you all know it comes easy.”

Long before his death Mr. Hill’s name had become known throughout the civilized world. “His fame was international. His services were cosmopolitan.” Among the many honors which were heaped upon him in recognition of his services to mankind was the degree of Doctor of Laws by Yale University. In conferring this degree, Professor Perrin, of Yale, said:—

“Mr. Hill is the last of the generations of wilderness conquerors, the men who interpreted the Constitution, fixed our foreign relations, framed the Monroe Doctrine, and blazed all the great trails which determined the nation’s future. He has always been an original investigator, and we know him now as a man of infinite information. Every item of his colossal success rests upon a series of facts ascertained by him before they had been noted by others, and upon the future relations which he saw in those facts to human need and national growth. He believes that no society can prosper in which intellectual training is not based upon moral and religious culture. He is a national economist on broad ethical and religious lines; but the greatest things in all his greatness are his belief in the spiritual significance of man and his longing for the perpetuation of American institutions at their highest and best.”

His interest in books as a source of education found expression in the great public library which he presented to the city of St. Paul. To him, the trained mind was a necessity for success. Whether trained in the university or in the active life of the world did not matter, so long as it was trained; that was all that concerned him.

Mr. Hill’s reputation in years to come will rest chiefly on his career as an “Empire-Builder.” But he was primarily a railroad manager and a railroad engineer. His knowledge of the great business of transportation made it possible for him to extend his interests far and wide; no opportunity came near him that he did not investigate, and no opportunity which he accepted was ever put aside until he had developed it to its most perfect completion.

Physically, he was a man who seemed to express in his appearance the force and character which distinguished him mentally among men. Slightly under average height, with a great head firmly set on square, powerful shoulders, he commanded attention. He was physically strong, and his powers of endurance, which served him so well in the long hard days of his early life, remained unimpaired almost to his death. His firm mouth was half hidden by a beard, whitened in his latter years. His brow was high. His eyes were alert and looked out from beneath shaggy eyebrows. He was a man of a notable appearance which demanded respect and inspired confidence.

“Work, hard work, intelligent work, and then some more work,” was one of his frequent explanations of his success, and his advice to others. To young men he said: “The best advice to a young man, as it appears to me, is old and simple. Get knowledge and understanding. Determine to make the most possible of yourself by doing to the best of your power useful work as it comes your way. There are no receipts for success in life. A good aim, diligence in learning every detail of your business, honest hard work, and a determination to succeed, win out every time, unless crossed by some exceptional accident or misfortune. Many opportunities come to every man. It depends upon himself, and upon what he shall make of himself, what he makes of opportunities and what they will make of him.”

From a poor farmer boy, in fifty years, James J. Hill, by the force of his own determination, and the opportunities common to all men in the great Republic of which he became a citizen, achieved a position among the world-leaders of his day. Wealth in millions came to him, not by inheritance or a stroke of speculative chance, but from the works which he himself had conceived and created. The achievements of his life will long be remembered, not only because of their public service, but because of their inspiration to other men by affording an example of the heights which may be reached by hard work, imagination, and determination to succeed.

VIII

AUGUSTUS SAINT-GAUDENS

_Born in Dublin, Ireland, 1848_
_Died in Cornish, New Hampshire, 1907_

In a little house in Dublin, Ireland, on March 1, 1848, was born Augustus Saint-Gaudens. There was nothing in the humble surroundings which first greeted his eyes to mark the baby as in any way different from the many other babies who may have been born on the same first day of March in the ancient Irish city.

Augustus Saint-Gaudens, however, inherited from his father and mother something far greater than wealth or name, for in their sturdy, honest blood he found that indefinable thing called “character,” which, throughout his life, led him steadily forward along the straight path to fame and honor. From his parents he also inherited the qualities which are inherent in a romantic people; for his father was born in France, in the little village of Aspet at the foot of the Pyrenees, and his mother, whose maiden name was Mary McGuiness, gave him the love of the beautiful which belongs to Ireland. But perhaps, after all, his parents gave him a like inheritance, for Ireland is an old nation into which in centuries past has been infused the blood of the proudest families of France—Irish by birth and French by inheritance, he might be called.

The elder Saint-Gaudens was a shoemaker, and he had met the mother of the future Augustus in the shoe store for which he made shoes and where she did the binding of slippers. When Augustus was but a few months old his parents emigrated to the United States and in the month of September in the year of his birth he landed in the city of Boston, a place which in later years became deeply identified with his activities.

From Boston the little family proceeded to New York, where Bernard Saint-Gaudens, the father, set up his small business and secured humble lodging nearby for his family. And here the young Augustus made the beginning of his conscious life, in which, of early memories, most vivid were the “delightful reminiscences of the smell of cake in the bakery at the corner of the street, and of the stewed peaches of the German family in the same house.”

Above the door of the shop hung the sign “French Ladies’ Boots and Shoes”; and within, the shoemaker, with his “wonderfully complex mixture of French accent and Irish brogue,” varied his occupation of making shoes with endless duties which he undertook as the organizer and leading figure in several societies which flourished in the French colony of the city. Customers came readily to the little shop, for its proprietor was an able workman, despite certain agreeable eccentricities, and the business, growing steadily, provided an adequate, if simple, upbringing for Augustus and his two brothers.

_Copyright, 1915, by de W. C. Ward_

_Augustus Saint-Gaudens_ (Signature)]

Many are the memories of those early days, memories of a wholesome and normal boyhood. There are memories of fires, of street-fights with boys of other neighborhoods, of school-days, of a never-to-be-forgotten excursion to the country, of the delight of his first reading of “Robinson Crusoe,” and of the famous actress Rachel playing “Virginia” in Niblo’s Garden. And there are memories of boyhood loves, memories all that “pass across the field of my vision like ships that appear through the mist for a moment and disappear.”

With the early end of his school days Augustus turned to the actual earning of his daily bread. He was thirteen years old. To his father’s question as to what kind of work appealed most strongly to him he had answered, “I should like it if I could do something which would help me to be an artist.” It was a decision that must have seemed strange to the father, who perhaps had seen in the boy a possible assistant in his growing business; but wisely he respected the desire that Augustus expressed, and a few weeks later the boy was apprenticed to a Frenchman named Avet, the first stone-cameo cutter in America.

A cameo is a fine relief of a human head, or the head of an animal, cut in a stone or shell, often so done as to show the design in a layer of one color with another color as a background. The stones, which were usually amethysts or malachite, were at that period extremely fashionable, and were worn in rings, or scarf-pins, or breast-pins by men and women. The work was fine and required skill and patience and artistic ability; so for a long time Augustus was limited to the preparation of the stones, which Avet would finish and later sell to the leading jewelers of the city.

Avet was a hard taskmaster and the monotonous labor over the whirring lathe was irksome to the red-blooded boy, who looked up from the spinning-wheel at the white clouds sailing across the little window above him and heard the rumble of wheels and the hum of life in the distant street. But in his few hours of leisure there were glimpses of stirring events never to be forgotten. There was the excitement attending the election of Abraham Lincoln to the Presidency, “Honest Abe, the Rail-Splitter.” There was the recruiting of troops for the great Civil War which for four long years racked the land. And later, from the window in front of his lathe, Saint-Gaudens watched the volunteers from New England as they tramped down Broadway, singing “John Brown’s Body” as they marched.

Day after day Saint-Gaudens ground and turned the stones on his lathe, and all day long he listened to the voice of Avet, scolding and swearing as he worked. One day came the breaking-point. At noon the boy had quietly eaten his luncheon from the little box which he brought each morning with him to his work. Some crumbs had fallen on the floor, and Avet, seeing them, burst into a fury and discharged him on the spot. Without comment he folded up his overalls, left the shop, and going at once to his father’s store, explained exactly what had occurred. Within a few minutes Avet followed, apologetic and promising even more money if the boy would return. Without hesitation Saint-Gaudens refused, and in later life he often recalled his father’s “proud smile” as he made his decision.

There is credit in sticking to a hard job, and there is equal credit in a manly refusal to continue to work under intolerable conditions. Saint-Gaudens’s act brought its own reward, for his next employer, Mr. Jules le Brethon, a shell-cameo cutter, was a man unlike Avet in every particular, and it was through this new connection that the path to Saint-Gaudens’s career as a sculptor was opened to him.

With his characteristic foresight in availing himself of every opportunity, the boy had early begun to devote his evenings to the study of drawing in the free classes at the Cooper Institute. Every day at six he left his work, and after a hurried supper, hastened to his classroom. He was appreciative of the great opportunity which the school afforded him, and he threw himself with all his soul into his work. “I became a terrific worker, toiling every night until eleven o’clock after the class was over. Indeed, I became so exhausted with the confining work of cameo-cutting by day and drawing at night, that in the morning mother literally dragged me out of bed, pushed me over to the washstand, where I gave myself a cat’s lick somehow or other, drove me to the seat at the table, administered my breakfast, and tumbled me downstairs out into the street, where I awoke.”

When the courses at the Cooper Union were finally accomplished, Saint-Gaudens took up new night work at the National Academy of Design, and it was here that his first appreciation of the antique came to him, and his first practice in drawing from the nude—training so fundamental for his great work in coming years.

Early in the year 1867 came another turning-point in his life. Ever since he had first begun to work, Saint-Gaudens had been giving his wages to his father to pay his share of the family expenses. And now the father, realising that the boy’s earnestness and ability were deserving of every opportunity which he could afford, made the offer of a trip to Europe, where he might see the art of the older civilizations and return to the United States broadened by his experience and observations.

Saint-Gaudens was nineteen years old. His father had paid for his passage in the steerage, and in his pocket were a hundred dollars which had been saved out of his wages. Arriving in Paris in a “mixed state of enthusiasm and collapse,” he spent a few days visiting in the household of an uncle, and then began his search of employment at cameo-cutting and of admission to the School of Fine Arts. Work was soon found in the establishment of an Italian. But entrance to the school was a more difficult proposition, and in order that no time should be wasted while he was waiting, he enrolled in a modeling school, working there mornings and nights and supporting himself on what he earned at cameo-cutting in the afternoon.

These were days and nights of almost superhuman exertion, but at the end of a year the desired admission to the school was obtained, and his real education began. It is customary for a student at the Beaux-Arts to select the master in whose atelier he wishes to study, and Saint-Gaudens selected Jouffroy, whose pupils in the preceding years had been particularly successful in capturing most of the prizes which were offered by the school.

Here Saint-Gaudens formed several friendships which endured throughout his life, and here also he began to mingle more widely with the men in the great world about him, although his time was far too occupied for more than an occasional hour or two of relaxation. “My ambition was of such a soaring nature, and I was so tremendously austere, that I had the deepest scorn of the ordinary amusements of the light opera, balls and what not.” And yet, when he did play, his play was of the hardest. He was active beyond measure, and it is doubtless to the hours of hard physical exercise which he got at night in the gymnasium and the swimming-baths, that he owed the health which gave him the endurance necessary for his long hours in the classroom. Occasionally, walking trips, with one or two companions, gave well-deserved vacations—trips from which the walkers returned tired and penniless, but inspired by the beauty of nature in the pleasant French countryside and thrilled with the stupendous grandeur of the Alpine scenery.

But now, in the year 1870, the dark clouds of the Franco-Prussian War suddenly gathered. War was declared. The streets of Paris were congested with shouting, marching crowds. The enlistment places were filled with men joining the colors. To the young American the problem of his own line of action seemed difficult to decide. Everything within him urged him to enlist under the flag of France. But he was a citizen of another land, and aged parents awaited his return. He decided to withhold his decision. Once, indeed, he returned to Paris from Limoges fixed in his purpose to join his French companions; but there he found a letter from his mother, so pathetic that he reluctantly abandoned his intention, returned to Limoges, and a few months later started for Rome.

After the cold, gray months of a Paris winter, and the misery and suffering of the war, the glowing warmth and beauty of the Holy City exhilarated and exalted him. “It was as if a door had been thrown wide open to the eternal beauty of the classical.” Here, living almost in poverty, he continued the work so well begun in Paris. Here, also, he began the statue of Hiawatha, “pondering, musing in the forest, on the welfare of his people”—the first of the long list of world-recognized masterpieces which the strenuous labor of his life produced. So poor, indeed, was Saint-Gaudens at this time, that it was only through the kindness of an American, who advanced him the money to cast the figure, that he was able to complete the work. For this same gentleman Saint-Gaudens modeled busts of his two daughters, and through him he also received a commission for copies of the busts of Demosthenes and Cicero.

In Rome Saint-Gaudens also first made the acquaintance of Dr. Henry Shiff, a comrade whose friendship lasted throughout his life. Shiff was considerably the senior of Saint-Gaudens, but his deep appreciation of art and literature, and his frank, friendly nature endeared him to the young and struggling sculptor, and gave him the inspiration that is always found in the true appreciation of a loyal friend.

In 1872 Saint-Gaudens returned to New York; but his stay was brief, for he was eager to return to Italy for a few years more before definitely establishing himself in the United States. While in New York, much work was accomplished, but little of it should be included in a list of his works, for in the main it consisted of jobs of one sort or another necessary to earn the money which his living required. Here, however, he began his bust of Senator William M. Evarts, one of the foremost orators in the United States, and, during the years 1877 to 1881, Secretary of State in the administration of President Hayes. Then, also, he received a number of other commissions for busts and, of particular importance, a commission for a figure of Silence to be placed in a Masonic building in New York. It was a sudden and bewildering amount of work for the young sculptor, and it brought vividly to him, after his struggling years of poverty in Europe, a realization of the appreciation and reward which the United States so freely offered.

In 1875 Augustus Saint-Gaudens returned again to the United States, but this time to take his place as a full-fledged sculptor. Behind him were years of hard but fruitful experience. From the long period at which he had worked at his cameo-cutting he had developed a keen eye and a sure hand with his tools. From Paris and Rome he had obtained the practice which he required in actual work from the human figure, and from Rome in particular he had learned “what to leave untouched” and had acquired “an ability to choose his subjects from among the important figures of the moment, and then to give his best efforts to transforming them into vital and eternal symbols.”

On his arrival in New York he rented a small studio in an old building, and was soon intensively occupied in a life in which modeling, teaching, and studying filled the long hours, and carried on often far into the night. Dark and depressing seemed the New York winter after the warmth and color of Italy; and to bring back more vividly the memory of the tinkling, splashing fountains that played in the Roman sunshine, he would turn on the water in the little wash-basin in his studio and let the gentle sound carry his thoughts back to the gardens of Rome.

But now came two commissions which left no opportunity for thoughts of anything but the work in hand. From Governor Dix of New York came a commission for a statue of Robert Richard Randall, a wealthy citizen of New York City in the early years of the nineteenth century, who had left his fortune for the founding of the Sailors’ Snug Harbor, on Staten Island, a home for aged deep-sea sailormen. At the same time he obtained a commission for the statue of Admiral David G. Farragut,—the first Admiral of the United States Navy, and the hero of Mobile Bay,—which stands in Madison Square, New York. The importance of these commissions did much to raise the spirits and fire the ambition of Saint-Gaudens, and at the same time the constantly increasing friendships which he was forming helped him to find the happiness of congenial comradeship which his nature sought. “There is no doubt,” he has written, “that my intimacy with John LaFarge has been a spur to higher endeavor”; and there were others who gave him similar inspiration by their warm appreciation of his ambitions.

It was in the year 1877 that Saint-Gaudens took a principal part in the founding of the Society of American Artists. The establishment of this society was an important milestone in the progress of American art, for with it came a vital change in American painting and sculpture. Previously, art in the United States had been more or less burdened with conventions and a dull technique. But this stagnant state now became stirred and freshened by the flood of a new generation of artists. Such men as Saint-Gaudens, Eastman Johnson, John LaFarge, Winslow Homer, and John S. Sargent began to remonstrate against the things that were. These men and their fellows had felt abroad the new movement in artistic appreciation. It was their desire to give to America this new and virile expression, and in spite of the opposition of the conservatists of the established school,—the “old-timers,”—the new society received a welcome and became a constantly increasing factor and force in the development of American art.

A year was now spent in the modeling of a high bas-relief depicting the “Adoration of the Cross by Angels,” which was to form the principal part of the interior decorations of St. Thomas’s Church in New York, which were being designed by Mr. John LaFarge. This was important work and added greatly to Saint-Gaudens’s reputation; but only the memory of its beauty remains, for the church was later destroyed by fire.

In 1878 Saint-Gaudens again visited Paris, but this time his work and study held him there for three years. In a quiet studio which he hired in the Rue Notre Dame des Champs, work was begun on the Farragut statue, and also on a series of figures which were designed to ornament a mausoleum which Governor Morgan of Connecticut had commissioned him to execute. It is a strange coincidence that the angels for the Morgan tomb were later destroyed by fire, as were the angels of St. Thomas’s Church.

“In the years I passed this time in Paris there was little of the adventurous swing of life that pervaded my previous struggles.” Work on his commissions almost wholly occupied him. There were, however, occasional excursions, and the presence of two friends, Stanford White and McKim, who were already winning their reputation as brilliant New York architects, did much to break the tedium of his work.

The Farragut statue was finally completed, and on the afternoon of a beautiful day in May, 1881, it was unveiled to the eyes of the public. In his “Reminiscences” Saint-Gaudens described this memorable occasion: “These formal unveilings of monuments are impressive affairs and variations from the toughness that pervades a sculptor’s life. For we constantly deal with practical problems, with moulders, contractors, derricks, stone-men, ropes, builders, scaffoldings, marble assistants, bronze-men, trucks, rubbish-men, plasterers, and what-not else, all the while trying to soar into the blue.—But if managed intelligently there is a swing to unveilings, and the moment when the veil drops from the monument certainly makes up for many of the woes that go towards the creating of the work. On this special occasion Mr. Joseph H. Choate delivered the oration. The sailors who assisted added to the picturesqueness of the procession. The artillery placed in the park, back of the statue, was discharged. And when the figure in the shadow stood unveiled, and the smoke rolled up into the sunlight upon the buildings behind it, the sight gave an impression of dignity and beauty that it would take a rare pen to describe.”

During the year 1877 Saint-Gaudens was married to Augusta F. Homer of Boston. Recognition had come to his work; his professional future seemed assured. Now, by this happy marriage, domestic tranquillity and congenial companionship were added.

On his return from Europe Saint-Gaudens took a studio on Thirty-Sixth Street in New York, and here were begun the Sunday afternoon concerts which soon became celebrated because of the literary men and artists who gathered there, and invitations were eagerly sought and highly prized. But in 1885 Saint-Gaudens moved from the city and established his family in an old Colonial house at Cornish, New Hampshire. “I had been a boy of the streets and sidewalks all my life,” he says, “but during this first summer in the country, it dawned on me seriously how much there was outside of my little world.” Here was open country, a land of green hills and sky, a place where the man to whom beauty was a living thing might find widening inspiration.