Mrs. Hemenway devoted her life to such works as these. It is impossible to enumerate here all her noble undertakings; but they were many. "Mrs. Hemenway was a woman whose interests and sympathies were as broad as the world," says Edwin D. Mead, "but she was a great patriot; and she was pre-eminently that. She had a reverent pride in our position of leadership in the history and movement of modern democracy; and she had a consuming zeal to keep the nation strong and worthy of its best traditions, and to kindle this zeal among the young people of the nation. With all her great enthusiasms, she was an amazingly practical and definite woman. She wasted no time nor strength in vague generalities, either of speech or action. Others might long for the time when the kingdom of God should cover the earth as the waters cover the sea, and she longed for it; but, while others longed, she devoted herself to doing what she could to bring that corner of God's world in which she was set into conformity with the laws of God,--and this by every means in her power, by teaching poor girls how to make better clothes and cook better dinners and make better homes, by teaching people to value health and respect and train their bodies and love better music and better pictures and be interested in more important things. Others might long for the parliament of man and the federation of the world, and so did she; but while others longed, she devoted herself to doing what she could to make this nation, for which she was particularly responsible, fitter for the federation when it comes. The good state for which she worked was a good Massachusetts; and her chief interest, while others talked municipal reform, was to make a better Boston."[[24]]
Popular Education and Public Libraries.
The interest of Unitarians in popular education and the general diffusion of knowledge may be further indicated by a few illustrations. One of these is the Lowell Institute in Boston, founded by John Lowell, son of Francis Cabot Lowell, and cousin of James Russell Lowell. He was a Boston merchant, became an extensive traveller, and died in Bombay, in 1836, at the age of thirty-four. In his will he left one-half his fortune for the promotion of popular education through lectures, and in other ways. John Amory Lowell became the trustee of this fund, nearly $250,000; and in December, 1839, the Lowell Institute began its work with a lecture by Edward Everett, which gave a biographical account of John Lowell, and a statement of the purposes of the Institute. Since that time the Lowell Institute has given to the people of Boston, free of charge, from fifty to one hundred lectures each winter. The topics treated have taken a wide range, and the lecturers have included many of the ablest men in this and other countries. The work of the Lowell Institute has also included free lectures for advanced students given in connection with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, science lectures to the teachers of Boston, and a free drawing school.
In 1846 Louis Agassiz came to this country to lecture before the Lowell Institute. The result was that he became permanently connected with Harvard University, and transferred his scientific work to this country. This was accomplished by means of the gift of Abbott Lawrence, who founded the Lawrence Scientific School in 1847. Although the Lowell Institute was founded by a Unitarian, and although it has always been largely managed by Unitarians, it has been wholly unsectarian in its work. Many of its lecturers have been of that body, but only because they were men of science or of literary attainments.
In 1854 Peter Cooper founded the Cooper Union in New York for the Advancement of Science and Art, to promote "instruction in branches of knowledge by which men and women earn their daily bread; in laws of health and improvement of the sanitary conditions of families as well as individuals; in social and political science, whereby communities and nations advance in virtue, wealth, and power; and finally in matters which affect the eye, the ear, and the imagination, and furnish a basis for recreation to the working classes." He erected a large building, and established therein the Cooper Institute, with its reading-room, library, lectures, schools, and other facilities for bringing the means of education within reach of those who could not otherwise obtain them.
Peter Cooper was an earnest Unitarian in his opinions, attending the church of Dr. Bellows; but he was wholly without sectarian bias. In a letter addressed to the delegates to the Evangelical Alliance, at its session held in New York in 1873, he expressed the catholicity and the humanitarian spirit of his religion. "I look to see the day," he wrote, "when the teachers of Christianity will rise above all the cramping power and influence of conflicting creeds and systems of human device, when they will beseech mankind by all the mercies of God to be reconciled to the government of love, the only government that can ever bring the kingdom of heaven into the hearts of mankind either here or hereafter."
About 1825 there was opened in Dublin, N.H., under the auspices of Rev. Levi W. Leonard, minister of the Unitarian church in that village, the first library in the country that was free to all the inhabitants of a town or city. In the adjoining town of Peterboro, in 1833, under the leadership of Rev. Abiel Abbot, also the Unitarian minister, a library was established by vote of the town. This library was maintained by the town itself, being the first in the country supported from the tax rates of a municipality. In the work of these Unitarian ministers may be found the beginnings of the present interest in the establishment and growth of free public libraries.
In the founding and endowment of libraries, Unitarians have taken an active part. What they have done in this direction may be illustrated by the gift of Enoch Pratt of one and a quarter million dollars to the public library in Baltimore. Concerning the time when Jared Sparks was the minister of the Unitarian church in Baltimore, Professor Herbert B. Adams has said: "Some of the most generous and public-spirited people of Baltimore were connected with the first independent church. Afterwards, men who were to be most helpful in the upbuilding of Baltimore's greatest institutions--the Peabody Institute, the Pratt Library, and the Johns Hopkins University--were associated with the Unitarian society."[[25]]
Professor Barrett Wendell speaks of George Ticknor as "the chief founder of the chief public library in the United States."[[26]] Ticknor undoubtedly did more than anybody else to make the Boston Public Library the great institution it has become, not only in giving it his own collection of books, but also in its inception and in its organization. The best working library in the country, that of the Boston Athenaeum, also owes a very large debt to the early Unitarians, with whom it originated, and by whom it was largely maintained in its early days.