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A'ND'R.E^'NV C?A1^TSIE.G1E

PTilT<?ME,TT

ANDREW CARNEGIE

AN
ANNIVERSARY ADDRESS
DELIVERED BEFORE THE
CARNEGIE INSTITUTE
OF TECHNOLOGY ON
NOVEMBER THE 24th, 1915

BV
HENRY S. PRITCHETT
Ph.D., Scb., LL.D.

CLEVELAND
PRIVATELY PRINTED
191 S

C, The Librarian and the Vice-Librarians of the Cleveland
Public Library send cordial greetings to their associates in
the Library and in the Western Reserve Library School,
Christmas, 1915.
€Llt is peculiarly fitting that Mr. Carnegie should be
honored in the Cleveland Public Library, which owes to
his generosity its system of branch libraries, and in the
Western Reserve Library School, which is his foundation.

tLThis address was delivered on November 24, 1915,
at a meeting in honor of the eightieth birthday of Mr.
Carnegie and the tenth anniversary of the opening of
the Carnegie Institute of Pittsburgh. It is printed by
the kind permission of Dr. Pritchett.
fL.The portrait is from a painting by Howard Russell
Butler, N. A. , in the possession of the Cleveland Public
Library; cover-inset represents the entrance to the Carnegie
South Branch oj the Cleveland Public Library.

\mmmCh- ' ^ « ^ ^^

ANDREW CARNEGIE
"Time is the Nurse and Breeder of all Good" — Proteus
WE are met to celebrate the tenth
anniversary of the opening of the
Carnegie Institute of Technology,
and to felicitate at the same time the
founder of the Institute upon his eightieth
natal day. In ten short years the school
which Mr. Carnegie created has grown
into a great human agency, gathering in
to its field of influence each year more
than three thousand students, and minis
tering to an ever-widening circle. No
mere words can convey to the founder
the sense of satisfaction which this
achievement brings.
I am your speaker today because I
happen to belong to one of the group of
institutions which Mr. Carnegie has creat
ed. Your board might have invited on
this anniversary occasion some distin
guished man, who from the standpoint of
the outside world would have borne
tribute more eloquently than I can hope
to do to Mr. Carnegie's service to man
kind. I am here as one of you. We have
come together as members of a family
of institutions to join in a common ex
pression of congratulation to the man

who has created and set in motion all of
them. This is essentially a family gather
ing, and what I may have to say is in the
way of a family talk rather than in the
nature of a public address.
I bring you first of all a word of greet
ing from Mr. Carnegie himself. He has
returned to New York after the summer
rest, full of his old-time spirit. It was
his wish to be with you today; but for
the first time in his life he finds himself
obliged to accept the doctor's commands,
and to give himself less generously than
has been his wont to these annual gather
ings. By proxy, therefore, he sends his
affectionate greetings and good wishes.
He rejoices in your prosperity; he looks
forward with confidence to your useful
ness, growing with each succeeding year;
and he hopes for ever-strengthening re
lations between this great Institute and
the community of which it is a part. He
sends these greetings in the name of him
self and of Mrs. Carnegie, for no one is
more alive than Mr. Carnegie to the fact
that the brightest day in all his eighty
years was that upon which Louise Whit
field endowed him with a fortune of
wifely devotion, of whole-hearted sympa
thy, and of sound womanly judgment.

We who are gathered here today look
forward to many years during which we
may have the companionship and the
counsel of both these friends.
On such an occasion it is fitting that
these six institutions created by one man
should look back to their beginning, and
seek to realize the relations they have to
each other. Ten years — the life of this
School of Technology — is but a day in
the evolution of the Institution for Re
search, or the Peace Endowment, or the
Pittsburgh Institute. What these in
stitutions are to mean to civilization will
be estimated not by us, but by succeed
ing generations. The oldest of us is less
than twenty years old, and the youngest
less than four. As institutions we are in
our infancy. The future lies beyond the
rim of the years; our past is brief; and at
such a moment we may well turn our
thought to our author and his purpose
in creating us. Who are we as factors
in human progress, and why were we
chosen? The Pittsburgh Institute, the oldest of
the family, was founded in 1896, the Re
search Institution at Washington in 1902,
the Hero Fund in 1904, the Foundation
for the Advancement of Teaching in
5

1905, the Peace Endowment in 1910, and
the Carnegie Corporation of New York —
the greatest endowment ever given in
trust for philanthropic purposes — in 1912.
Five of its eight trustees are heads of
the institutions which preceded it.
The founder has thus bound these in
stitutions together in relations of common
interest, of common counsel and of
friendly co-operation. He has indeed
made of them a family of institutions.
His fame for all time rests not upon one
or another of them, but upon their com
mon development, their combined use
fulness, their united contribution to civi
lization. We are a young family, this group of
six, too young to be tied to tradition.
We are growing at an astounding rate;
and before we are too old and too big it
is well to look back at our origin. Why
were we adopted rather than some other?
For a man chooses his intellectual and
spiritual children as he cannot choose
those of his own flesh and blood. What
function in the world were we born to
fulfill? These are questions to remember
in the days of our youth when the evil
days come not. In the asking of them
we turn our eyes necessarily to the found-

er himself, his purposes and his ideals.
We are the spiritual children of one man.
Why did he choose the fields of endeavor
represented by these institutions? Why
did he devote his wealth to these causes
in preference to others?
There are few subjects upon which
there is more vague talk than on the
question of the wise use of money. Al
most any man feels qualified to decide
the ways in which a fortune, however
great, ought to be disposed of. No verse
in the New Testament has been so
thoroughly accepted in recent years as
that one which intimates that he who
asks receives, that he who seeks finds,
that to him who knocks the door is open
ed. A mediocre cause sometimes out
strips in financial recognition a far more
important one, because it is represented
by a good asker. There is nothing in
which good men are more enthusiastic
than in the giving away of other people's
money. Yet all experience shows that giving
may cut two ways; it may help or hurt,
it may stimulate or demoralize, it may
save or destroy. The art of giving is the
most difficult to which civilized man has
set himself; and for this reason, to him

who has, giving is easier than withhold
ing. There is no attribute of the Al
mighty which men find it so difficult to
imitate as the power to let things alone,
the ability to wait, the decision not to
interfere. The laws of nature, adminis
tered by the wisest human being, would
find themselves constantly subject to in
terruption and reversal. No weather-
bureau could hope to exist a month if it
could make the weather, instead of
simply predicting it. The problem of
giving is not made simpler when it is
transferred from an individual to a giving
corporation. Such trusts will be held,
and ought to be held, by public opinion,
to a stricter accountability than the
personal owner of wealth. Public opin
ion is the judge which in the long run will
decide whether the distributors of
wealth have dealt wisely with their trust.
One embarrassment confronts the dis
tributors of wealth, seeking to devote
money ^to the upbuilding of men, not
always realized by him who asks. This
lies in the wide discrepancy between
men's estimate of what they think they
are doing and what unbiased observers
think they are doing. Men praise, and
rightly, the scientific attitude of mind,
8

the high spirit and the broad tolerance
which science infuses into its disciples.
Yet it requires no keen observer to see
that scientific men are as intolerant as
theologians. Theology is itself the
science of religion. The lawyers plead
eloquently the judical attitude of the
law, but lawyers and judges in their
human relations are not more judicial-
minded than other men. Preachers
speak earnestly of the power of religion
in the human soul, but in their own lives
only a few succeed in setting forth the
ideals of true Christianity. That wise
philosopher, Sancho Panza, described the
universal human experience when he
said, "We are all as God made us, and
some of us a little worse." The world
is full of devotion; but devotion which
thinks clearly, which has a true perspec
tive, which can reckon with time, is rare.
In the face of this complex of human
aspirations, ideals, weaknesses and self-
deceptions, the men seeking to help the
world through money must sweat blood
if they work out their own salvation and
that of other people. Wise giving is the
hardest work any man ever entered upon.
In this endeavor Mr. Carnegie blazed
new paths and sought new fields.
9

The first great step that Mr. Carnegie
took was to consecrate his wealth to
humanity. He has made vital, in our
country at least, the conception that the
holder of wealth is a trustee for the public.
The notion, when Mr Carnegie presented
it twenty years ago, was not a new one.
Other men had advanced the theory of
the responsibility of private wealth, but
such a philosophy had been put forward
mainly by theorists. Never before had
a man, himself possessed of enoi-mous
wealth, so frankly, so clearly and so
strikingly enunciated the formula of the
responsibility of wealth to the general
good. Mr. Carnegie's emphatic support
of this conception is in large measure
responsible for the sentiment which exists
in our country today with regard to the
responsibility of men of wealth. That
sentiment has crystalized into an almost
universal feeling that the man who dies
possessed of great wealth, but who de
votes no part of it to the public use, is a
failure. If the shades of those who in
this mortal life were possessed of great
wealth, and who have passed out of it
with no recognition of this obligation,
ever walk their ancient ways and listen
to the words of those who were their
fellow- men, there are many ears today on
10

thepther side that burn, whether they re
side in the one place or in the other.
The most noteworthy thing about Mr.
Carnegie's preaching of the doctrine of
the consecration of wealth is the fact
that his practice has honestly squared
with his preaching. The great bulk of his
accumulations, some three hundred and
fifty millions of dollars, has been turned
back by him to the public to be used in
the cause of human betterment. He is
a man of moderate fortune as fortunes are
counted today. This fact is the first as
tounding accomplishment to which the
historian of the future will point when he
comes to estimate Mr. Carnegie's service.
Mr. Carnegie as a trustee of wealth
occupied a unique position. Born on one
continent, brought up and educated upon
another, his sympathies were world-wide.
It is the more interesting to note under
such conditions the causes in which he
chose to work, and which fixed the char
acter of the family of institutions which
his brain and heart have called into being.
Outside of countless personal gifts, the
chief causes which Mr. Carnegie has
sought to stimulate are these: the pro-
11

motion of good reading through public
libraries, the cause of scientific research
through a research-institution, higher
education through the Carnegie Found
ation, human idealism through the Hero
Fund, international peace through the
Peace Endowment, discriminating phil
anthropy through the Carnegie Corpor
ation; last, and in some ways most inter
esting of all, service to his home city
through the Carnegie Institute of Pitts
burgh, of which this great school is a
part. These are great causes — good
reading, research, education, idealism,
world-peace, wise philanthropy, and fit
test of all, a ministry to the old home and
its aspirations. We may pause for a
glance at each.
The development of the public library
has been a remarkable phenomenon in
civilized nations in the last twenty-five
years. Mr. Carnegie is himself a product
of good reading. He knew by hard ex
perience what books mean to a boy, and
what the want of them means. As a
railroad man in his youth he may have
met an old section-foreman known to
some of you who desired to give his wife
a present for her birthday. He decided
to give her a book; but remembering. that
12

she had a book already, he as a matter
of course gave her something else.
No one can measure the results which
spring from bringing an ambitious youth
into contact with the great literature of
the world. Furthermore, the public lib
rary represents a form of giving as little
likely to do harm as any agency which
private wealth can employ. So heartily
and so systematically has Mr. Carnegie
developed the notion of the public library
that his name will always be associated
with it, not alone in the United States
and Canada, but in England and Scot
land as well.
Mr. Carnegie's gift to scientific re
search marks his agreement with the dis
tinctive spirit of our age. The attitude
of enquiry, the willingness to test theories
by practical facts, the thirst to study
and to investigate the causes of physical,
intellectual and social phenomena, are
the distinctive qualities of the modern
mind. Fundamentally a religious man,
Mr. Carnegie has been in hearty sym
pathy with the research-spirit, and chose
the field of scientific research as one of
the most promising means through which
human progress is to be stimulated.
13

The Carnegie Foundation for the Ad
vancement of Teaching is a contrib,ution
to the cause of education closely allied
to the gift to scientific research. Mr.
Carnegie has sought to make in this
foundation an endowment for education
which should partake of a continental
spirit; which should be confined to no
one study and to no one city; which
should seek to deal with the problem of
education as the endowment for scienti
fic research deals with research, upon the
broad plane of the larger human interests.
The Carnegie Hero Fund and the Car
negie Endowment for International Peace
represent a true idealism. The heroes
of the past have been in the main mili
tary heroes. Mr. Carnegie through the
Hero Fund has undertaken to awaken in
the public mind a consciousness of the
heroism of every-day life. The history
of this institution under wise manage
ment has already made clear to the pub
lic mind a new conception of the heroism
found in daily life and daily work.
The day of international peace seems
far distant. International relations are
clouded by complications of self-interest,
of suspicion, of misrepresentation, of in
ternational ambition. Notwithstanding
14

the sad plight in which civilization
stands today, thinking men do not doubt
that the world will yet turn to some form
of judicial settlement of international
difficulties, and that the principles upon
which Mr. Carnegie founded the Endow
ment for International Peace will, after
this crash of human passion, receive a
consideration and attain an ascendancy
over the minds of men which they have
never had before. Distant as may be
the day when armies cease to ravage,
when nations cease to attack each other,
when war is no longer assumed to be the
only settlement of international troubles,
the fact still remains that the world must
work toward such an ideal if civilization
is to remain. We realize in the horrors of
war how much of all this misery has come
from unrestrained ambitions, from un
worthy suspicions, from an unwise and
sensational press. We see clearly that
the road toward a permanent peace lies
through the creation of those relations
which "in the future will bring about
common confidence and allay unjust
suspicion. Toward this great end Mr.
Carnegie's endowment will in the long
run contribute its due share.
15

I speak of the Carnegie Institute of
Pittsburgh last, not because it is the old
est of these great foundations, but be
cause it is in some ways the most remark
able and far-reaching. The Institute em
braces a congeries of institutions: the
muncipal public library with its branches,
the museum of fine arts, the museum
of natural history, and the technical
schools, now become the Institute of Tech
nology. Education, science, art, music,
are here associated. Perhaps never be
fore were such agencies for the develop
ment of the life of a city brought together
under one board. Here are enlisted in
the work of this composite institution
all those causes which Mr. Carnegie has
sought to cultivate in the other institu
tions which he has founded. The de
velopment of a muncipal library makes
for good reading. The museum of fine
arts is a growing factor in the artistic
life and growth of the city. The museum
of natural history, which has become not
one of the largest, but one of the most
valuable museums in any country,
touches directly scientific research, and
also fosters that instruction of the public
in nature which a great city is so likely
to forget. Finally, the Institute in
cludes this great school with its various
16

divisions, offering education upon a uni
versity basis to the engineer, to the
architect and chemist, and to the worker
in home economics, while at the same
time affording in its day and night
schools the opportunity to men and
women in the trades to improve their
skill and to better their condition. It
would be difficult to imagine a combin
ation of human agencies united under
one administration better conceived in
order to lead the intellectual, moral and
spiritual forces of a community.
This great Institute has a significance of
its own, arising out of the fact that, un
like the other agencies which Mr. Car
negie has established, it has a home. It
was designed to minister to the indus
trial, intellectual and social forces of this
city. It was the tribute of love, from a
citizen of Pittsburgh, to the city in which
he had made his success, and in which
the greater part of his life had been spent.
An institution like the Hero Fund or the
Research Fund or the Carnegie Found
ation has no local habitation ; their ad
ministration could be in one city as well
as in another; they deal with conditions
throughout the whole country. But the
Pittsburgh Institute is essentially a home
17

institution. It is the gift of a son to the
mother who brought him up, a mother
who goes on increasing in vitality and
power eternally.
And yet no one man, not even a de
voted son, can from the outside lift up
by his own efforts the civilization of a
city. He may help, he may be a contri
butor; but progress of a city in things
intellectual and spiritual can be made
only through the co-operation of the
people of a city. Such a gift as this,
great as it is, will fail of its largest de
velopment if there be not put into it the
devotion of the citizens themselves, if
it does not call out in the community a
response to the ideals for which it stands.
In just such proportion as the roots of
the Institute find their nourishment in
the actual life of its citizens, in just such
proportion will it be a fruitful agency in
the upbuilding of the community life.
As we look back, on this anniversary
day, upon the creations of Mr. Carnegie's
brain — his spiritual children — two facts
concerning them stand out as significant
and far-reaching.
The first relates to the character of
these institutions which he has created.
18

They are all agencies for human better
ment, for human progress, for human up
lift. They contribute to the construc
tive side of human endeavor, not to the
destructive side. They are essentially
constructive forces in civilization.
Secondly, these constructive agencies
which Mr. Carnegie has conceived and
set in motion are today in their infancy,
but they are to have immortal lives.
Decade after decade, century after cen
tury, they will make their contribution
to the progress of their age and of their
generation. They are immortal agen
cies in the forward march of humanity.
To have conceived and to have set in
motion such immortal forces for human
upbuilding is to become oneself a par
taker of immortality.
It remains to us who are associated
in the direction of these great forces to
consecrate ourselves also to their up
building in a spirit not only devoted and
unselfish, but with vision to comprehend
human faith and human hope. These
are days when humanity is crucified.
Never was there greater need of unself
ishness and of devotion; but above all
there is need of vision and of judgment.
As the founder has consecrated his
19

wealth, so also do we consecrate our lives
to the cause of humanity, hoping to
serve not blindly but with true vision.
Time is the nurse and breeder of all good ;
but only they who have vision and im
agination learn to work with time.

20

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