Always a generous and helpful man, he had definitely begun, a few years before his retire ment, a new existence consecrated to public serv ice, and to which he will owe enduring re membrance. Another generation would have forgotten the mere business man, however great; for after all it would have had steel from some source, if perhaps less cheaply; but it could not have had from lesser men, and would not have had from any, the splendid, judicious and permanently useful gifts with which he has endowed it, and which no change of social ideals can render obsolete or harmful. No one has ever so royally returned to the public what he had (to its own benefit) drawn from the public. This is his own expressed conviction of duty; that wealth is a sacred trust to be administered for the highest good of the people,° and that sometime ((the man who dies possessed of millions free and ready to be distributed, will die disgraced." But he is equally emphatic in declaring that indiscriminate giving is mostly sheer mischief, and that no person and no community can be permanently helped except by their own co operation. Therefore, every gift of his to a community is conditioned on the latter support ing it; and all those to institutions are thought out, and so bestowed that they forward the work without impairing the springs of public interest, or the ties to the public, which must after all be their permanent stay. These gifts are mostly not to charities in the current sense, relief of material distresses, for which the spirit of human brotherhood should be adequate; but for that mental and spiritual cultivation which should raise communities out of the lowest plane of social evils. An apparent exception, which, however, is not charity but justice and business sense, is the endowment of $4,000,000 given for an annuity fund to the workers at Homestead. The remainder of his• benefac tions may be divided broadly into institutions for research and the discovery of fertile new ideas; those for teaching the best of ideas and their practical appliances already known; and those for storing the results of knowledge and creation and distributing them to the public— in a word, universities, colleges and technical schools and libraries. Even the organs he has presented to several hundred churches may be classed in this category; as he genially ob served, he is willing to endorse unreservedly all the utterances of the organs, but not of the preachers. The greatest single foundation will be the Carnegie institute at Pittsburgh an enormous technological school, with library, art gallery and every imaginable accessory,— the people's college of what he thinks the coming type,— which has received $25,000,000 in all.
Next is the Carnegie Institution (q.v.) at Washington, to promote original research and enable original workers to use their whole time for study, experiment and creation; per haps his most valuable benefaction ultimately, since new ideas are at once the scarcest and the most valuable items of the world's income, and the work of one great man outweighs that of 10 generations of small ones. Of the others,
perhaps the most useful, considering the work, and the chief, is the gift of $600,000 to the Tus kegee Normal and Industrial Institute in Ala bama, conditioned on the trustees using enough of its income annually to free its president from money cares and the need of 'drumming' support for his college. Sixty-five libraries in New York have received $5,200,000, one in Saint Louis $1,000,000, and two in Detroit and San Francisco $750,000 each; libraries at Homestead, Braddock and Duquesne $1,000,000; and the universities in Scotland $10,000,000. In 1905 he established the Carnegie Foundation of $10, 000,000, the income from which provides retir ing pensions for teachers in colleges, universi ties and technical schools; and in December 1910 a Peace Fund of $10,000,000; $5,000,000 to the Hero Fund Commission, Pitts burgh; $1,500,000 to the Carnegie Hero Fund Trust, Dunfermline, Scotland; and the follow ing amounts to various Hero Funds: France $1,000,000; Germany $1,500,000; Belgium $230, 000; Denmark $125,000; Holland $200,000; Sweden $230,000; Switzerland $130,000; Italy $750,000; Norway $125,000.
He has also given $3,500,000 to the Carnegie Dunfermline Trust; $1,500,000 [or the Peace Temple at The Hague; $1,500,000 to the Allied Engineers' Society; and his total benefactions exceed $300,000,000, including over $60,000,000 for over 3,000 municipal library buildings; also the building and grounds for the Pan-American Union, VVashington, 1906; $16,150000 for Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching in United States, Canada and Newfoundland.
He is a life trustee of the Carnegie Corpora tion of New York ($125,000,000) which was founded to carry on the various works in which he has been engaged and to which he announced in 1912 that he had given all his fortune except $25,000,00). He was lord rector of Saint An drew's University in 1901-02 and 1906, and of Aberdeen University in 1912.
Mr. Carnegie has also won fame as an author. His first works, 'Notes • of a Trip Around the World' (1879) and 'Our Coaching Trip' (1882) were printed first for private cir culation, but published in consequence of the great pressure for private copies. 'An Ameri can Four-in-Hand in Britain' (1883) and 'Round the World' (1884) followed; but his greatest success was attained with 'Triumphant Democracy' (1886), which sold 40,000 copies within two years. 'The Gospel of Wealth' (1900); 'The Empire of Business' (1902, since translated into eight languages); 'James Watt' (1906); and 'Problems of To-day) (1909) have maintained his reputation as a clear, forcible and interesting writer and thinker. Consult Alderson, 'Andrew Carnegie: the Man and His Work.)