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 thousands 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.