His relations with his native land were always close, and, as already hinted, he gave much of his best effort to the study of means for her defence.  Toward his friends and relatives he was the embodiment of watchful care and generosity.  His private benefactions were for his means large, and were given with a whole-hearted generosity which must have added much to the love and esteem in which the recipients regarded him.  His public benefactions were also notable, and during the later years of his life he gave away regularly no inconsiderable share of his income.  Though gifted with reasonable prudence, he had no conception of the “business sense,” and no capacity as a money-getter.  After acquiring by his inventions and enterprise a modest competence, he devoted himself almost entirely to work less directly related to a financial return, and lived comfortably upon the principal which his earlier efforts had provided.

Ericsson had absolute faith in himself and in his mission to render available the energies of nature for the uses of humanity and civilization.  His character was framed about the central idea of fidelity to this mission.  He was dogmatic and optimistic as regards his own work; he had a contemptuous indifference to the work of others, and a disregard of the help which he might derive from a closer study of such work.  He trained himself, body, mind, and affections, solely with reference to his mission, and allowed no interference with it.  He was the embodiment of physical and mental vigor, prodigious industry, continuity of purpose, indomitable courage, capacity for great concentration of mind, and oblivion to all distracting surroundings.  With such characteristics, combined with the rare endowment of mental capacity and insight regarding the principles of engineering science, small wonder is it that his life was one so rich in results.  It could not have been otherwise, and the results simply came as a consequence of the combination of the characteristics of the man and the surroundings in which he was placed.

The question as to how much more or how much better he might have done had he possessed more faith in the work of others and a willingness to be guided in some measure by their experience is of course idle.  Ericsson was a combination of certain capacities and characteristics; a combination of other capacities and characteristics would not have been Ericsson, and any discussion of such a supposition is therefore aside from the purpose of this sketch.

John Ericsson lived in a period of rapid engineering development and change.  Old ideals were passing away, and the heritage which the Nineteenth Century was able to pass on to the Twentieth was in preparation.  In this preparation Ericsson bore a large and most important part.  So long as ships traverse the seas, Ericsson’s name will be remembered for his work in connection with the introduction of the screw-propeller.  So long as the memory of naval