PETER COOPER 303 formed the Canton Iron Company. Mr. Cooper took a large part of the pur- chase in stock at $45 a share, which he finally sold out at $230 a share. This was the beginning of his interest in the iron business, where the greater part of his fortune was made. The remainder came from his glue works and the industries connected with them. In 1873, the year of the great panic, in a letter to President Grant suggesting remedial legislation, Mr. Cooper said that not less than a thousand persons depended for their bread on the business carried on in the circle of his family. He had at that time two rolling-mills running, and two mills for the manufacture of wire and springs ; and his glue, oil, and isinglass works gave employment to two hundred persons. The story of Mr. Cooper's connection with the laying of the Atlantic cable has been so often told, that we do not repeat it here. It adds further testimony to his indomitable energy, his largeness of view, his financial ability, and the con- fidence that was felt in him by his fellow-men. The story of the difficulties, fail- ures and final success of this grandest achievement of modern science and enter- prise, is as romantic as any episode in social history. But, in Peter Cooper's view, the most important event in his life the one to which all his energies, his thoughts, his economies had been steadily directed since his youth was the founding of the institution that bears his name, and that has made him a powerful factor in the development of New York. It was the out- come, in the first place, of its founder's regret for the deficiencies of his own early training, which were owing partly to his parents' poverty and partly to the lack of public or free schools in his native city when he was a boy. But this regret, which could only have been felt by a man of superior intelligence, was made to flower in this great result by Mr. Cooper's genuine, deep, and unfailing love for his fellow-men, and his belief in the duty of every man to help the race forward in its progress to a better social condition. He has himself stated the principles on which his life was founded. His aim was "to render some equivalent to so- ciety, in some useful form of labor, for each day of his existence ; " and " while he had always recognized that the object of business is to make money in an honorable manner, he had endeavored to remember that the object of life is to do good." In 1876 Mr. Cooper was nominated for the presidency by the National In- dependent or "Greenback" party. It was with no selfish ambition that he al- lowed his name to go before the voters of the country, and his only regret at the result was that a policy was defeated which he believed to be for the public good. Mr. Cooper died April 4, 1883, at the age of ninety-two, after a short illness, the result of a cold. At his funeral, the late Dr. Crosby said : " What an exam- ple has been set by this life to our young men ! How it shows them what the true aim of life should be ! What an example to our wealthy men to show that money obtained by honest industry, and spent in benefiting mankind, will never produce war between labor and capital, but will assuage all angry elements, and give universal peace ! Oh ! if all our wealthy men were like Peter Cooper, all
