“There are men born with a genius for money-making,” says Mathews. “They have the instinct of accumulation. The talent and the inclination to convert dollars into doubloons by bargains or shrewd investments are in them just as strongly marked and as uncontrollable as were the ability and the inclination of Shakespeare to produce Hamlet and Othello, of Raphael to paint his cartoons, of Beethoven to compose his symphonies, or Morse to invent an electric telegraph. As it would have been a gross dereliction of duty, a shameful perversion of gifts, had these latter disregarded the instincts of their genius and engaged in the scramble for wealth, so would a Rothschild, an Astor, and a Peabody have sinned had they done violence to their natures, and thrown their energies into channels where they would have proved dwarfs and not giants.”
The opportunity which came to young Rockefeller does not occur many times in many ages: and in a generous interpretation of his opportunity he has already invested a great deal of his earnings in permanently useful philanthropies.
XIII
The Author of the Battle Hymn of the Republic—Her Views of Education for Young Women
A POET, author, lecturer, wit and conversationalist, Mrs. Julia Ward Howe unites with the attributes of a tender, womanly nature—which has made her the idol of her husband and children—the sterner virtues of a reformer; the unflinching courage which dares to stand with a small minority in the cause of right; the indomitable perseverance and force of character which persist in the demand for justice in face of the determined opposition of narrow prejudice and old-time conservatism.
Although more Bostonian than the Bostonians themselves, Mrs. Howe first saw the light in New York, and has spent much of her later life at Newport. Born in 1819, in a stately mansion near the Bowling Green, then the most fashionable quarter of New York, she was the fourth child of Samuel Ward and Julia Cutler Ward, people of unusual culture, refinement, and high ideals. Mr. Ward was a man of spotless honor and business integrity; and, although not wealthy as compared with the millionaires of to-day, his fortune was ample enough to surround his wife and children with all the luxuries and refinements that the most fastidious nature could crave. Mrs. Ward possessed a rare combination of personal charms and mental gifts, which endeared her to all who had the privilege of knowing her. All too soon, the death angel came and bore away the lovely young wife and mother, then in her twenty-eighth year.
Rousing himself, with a great effort, from the grief into which the death of his wife had plunged him, Mr. Ward devoted himself to the training, and education of his children. Far in advance of his age in the matter of higher education for women he selected as the tutor of his daughters the learned Doctor Joseph Green Cogswell, with instruction to teach them the full curriculum of Harvard college.
“LITTLE MISS WARD”
The scholarly and refined atmosphere of her father’s home, which was the resort of the most distinguished men of letters of the day, was an admirable school for the development of the literary and philosophic mind of the “little Miss Ward,” as Mr. Ward’s eldest daughter had been called from childhood.