In July, 1898, she said:
If I am able to keep the university in the condition it is now, I shall be more than thankful. $15,000 a month is a great expenditure, and exhausts my ingenuity and resources to such an extent that had I not the university so close to my heart I would relieve myself of this enormous burden and take rest and recreation for the next year. But I prefer to see the good work going on in its present condition, and I am not promising myself anything further for the future until the skies are brighter than they are now.
On December 14, 1900, she repeats:
I could lay down my life for the university. Not for any pride in its perpetuating the names of our dear son and ourselves, its founders, but for the sincere hope I cherish in its sending forth to the world grand men and women who will aid in developing the best there is to be found in human nature.
These extracts, largely from business letters, will show better than any words of mine her spirit and her faith. These must justify and make live the words I used on February 28, 1905, the date of Mrs. Stanford's sudden death in Honolulu.
Hers has been a life of the most perfect devotion both to her own and her husband' 8 ideals. If in the years we knew her she ever had a selfish feeling, no one ever detected it. All her thoughts were of the university and of the way to make it effective for wisdom and righteousness.
No one outside of the university can understand the difficulties in her way in the final establishment of the university, and her patient deeds of selfsacrifice can be known only to those who saw them from day to day. Some day the world may understand a part of this. It will then know her for the wisest, as well as the most generous, friend of learning in our time. It will know her as the most loyal and most devoted of wives. What she did was always the "best she could do. Wise, devoted, steadfast, prudent, patient and just—every good word we can use was hers by right. The men and women of the university feel the loss not alone of the most generous of helpers, but of the nearest of friends.To these words spoken when the shock of the death of the mother of the university first came to her children, I added later a single thought as to Mrs. Stanford's conception of the future development of the university.