Again, Peter Cooper has shown the world a good way of settling the old quarrel between capital and labor, the altercation between rich and poor.  There are two ways in which this conflict can never be settled.  One is the violent suppression of the laboring classes, and the other the violent assault of the rich.  This is getting to be the age of dynamite—­dynamite under the Kremlin, dynamite in proximity to Parliament House and railroad track, dynamite near lordly mansions, dynamite in Ireland, dynamite in England, dynamite in America.  The rich are becoming more exclusive, and the poor more irate.  I prescribe for the cure of this mighty evil of the world a large allopathic dose of Peter Cooperism.  You never heard of dynamite in Cooper Institute.  You never heard of any one searching the cellar of that man’s house for a keg of dynamite.  At times of public excitement, when prominent men had their houses guarded, there were no sentinels needed at his door.  The poorest man with a hod on his shoulder carrying brick up a wall begrudged not the philanthropist his carriage as he rode by.  No one put the torch to Peter Cooper’s glue factory.  When on some great popular occasion the masses assembled in the hall of Cooper Institute and its founder came on the platform, there were many hard hands that clapped in vigorous applause.  Let the rich stretch forth toward the great masses of England, Ireland, and America as generous and kind a hand as that of Peter Cooper, and the age of dynamite will end.  What police can not do, and shot and shell can not do, and strongest laws severely executed can not do, and armies can not do, will yet be accomplished by something that I see fit to baptize as Peter Cooperism.  I hail the early twilight of that day when a man of millions shall come forth and say:  “There are seventy thousand destitute children in New York, and here I put up and endow out of my fortune a whole line of institutions to take care of them; here are vast multitudes in filthy and unventilated tenement-houses, for whom I will build a whole block of residences at cheap rents; here are nations without Christ, and I turn my fortune inside out to send them flaming evangels; there shall be no more hunger, and no more sickness, and no more ignorance, and no more crime, if I can help it.”  That spirit among the opulent of this country and other countries would stop contention, and the last incendiary’s torch would be extinguished, and the last dagger of assassination would go to slicing bread for poor children, and the last pound of dynamite that threatens death would go to work in quarries to blast foundation-stones for asylums and universities and churches.  May the spirit of Peter Cooper and Wm. E. Dodge come down on all the bank stock and government securities and railroad companies and great business houses of America!