BEECHER FAMILY, The, an extraordi nary American family of religious and humani tarian leaders, mostly of such salient and frequently eccentric originality, combined with immense energy and independence of thought, that the human race was once said to consist of (cmen, women and Beecliers.p They were all descendants of Lyman Beecher of New Haven, Conn., himself one of the most notable of them; a famous clergyman, orator and con troversalist, who had 13 children, so many of whom rose to national or even international distinction that he was said to be ((the father of more brains than any other man in America.) Eight of them were boys, .seven living to ma turity and nearly all of them to extreme old age, all becoming Congregational ministers; and the greatest, Henry Ward, said of them that "only one tned to escape the ministry and he did not succeed." But so great was the intrinsic force of the blood that the daughters were no whit inferior in persistence of energy and originality of ideas; that marriage did not in the least quench their outside ilvork and in fluence, and that one of them has shown the highest creative genius and left the most en during memorials of the entire family. The difference in work and sympathies of father and children resulted from difference of generation rather than of spirit. Lyman Beecher's prob lems were mainly religious. He lived at the threshold of the new material development of the country, when it seemed that the en grossing task was to prevent its relapsing to heathenism; at the beguiling of the great lib eralizing flood of new scientific knowledge, when there seemed a danger of all Christianity being swept away with the cosmology it rested on ; and before the humanitarian questions in this prosperous country had come to the fore. He was nearly 60 when the slavery problem first showed signs of becoming acute; more than 60 when Father Mathew established his first temperance society across the water; and at no period would he ever have favored woman suffrage, which even one of his notable daugh ters wrote against. But his influence was in tensely strong in creating the lofty spirit that fed humanitarianism. It is an encouragement to large families, as so often in history, that the greatest of his children were among the younger ones: Mrs. Stowe was the sixth and Henry
Ward Beecher seventh, while the most forceful of the others, Isabella (Mrs. Hooker), was the eleventh. In their order, the ones who grew up were Catherine, William Henry, Edward, Mary, George, Harriet, Henry Ward, Charles, Isa bella, Thomas and James. Catherine, robbed of the betrothed of her youth, gave herself to work for her sex, though not with quite the aspirations of most recent women of her type, and perhaps did as much good in training culti vated wives and mothers as if they had re mained unmarried teachers. William Henry was a home missionary and clergyman in Ohio and a clergyman in the East. Edward was a clergyman, editor and theological writer, who tried to pour antique Zoroastrianism into mod ern molds. Mary married in Hartford, Conn., and became the mother of Frederick Beecher Perkins and grandmother of Charlotte Perkins Stetson. George died by accident at 34, while filling a Western pastorate. Harriet, author of