One spinster of the family residing in Detroit expressed much regret that she had no husband.  The reason she gave, however, was highly complimentary to the sterner sex,—­because she had no husband to send to the Civil war.  Having none, she paid the regulation bounty and had a man in the service of her country for three years in lieu of the husband she would have sent if she had had one.

The Jukes were as far removed as possible from literature.  They not only never created any, but they never read anything that could by any stretch of the imagination be styled good reading.  In the Edwards family some sixty have attained prominence in authorship or editorial life.  “Richard Carvel,” is by Mr. Winston Churchill, a descendant of Mr. Edwards, and I have found 135 books of merit written by the family.  Eighteen considerable journals and periodicals have been edited and several important ones founded by the Edwards family.

The Jukes did not wander far from the haunts of Max.  They stagnated like the motionless pool, while the Edwards family is a prominent factor in the mercantile, industrial, and professional life of thirty-three states of the union and in several foreign countries, in ninety-two American and many foreign cities.  They have been pre-eminently directors of men.  The Pacific steamship line and fifteen American railway systems have had as president, superintendent, or otherwise active in the management one of this family.  Many large banks, banking houses, and insurance companies have been directed by them.  They have been owners or superintendents of large coal mines in Pennsylvania and West Virginia, of large iron plants and vast oil interests in Pennsylvania, and of silver mines in Nevada.  There is scarcely any great American industry that has not had one of this family among its chief promoters.  Eli Whitney of cotton-gin fame married a granddaughter of Jonathan Edwards.

Prison reform has found its leading advocates in this family.  Wilberforce’s best American friend was of this fold, and Garibaldi valued one of the family above all other American supporters.

Whatever the Jukes stand for, the Edwards family does not.  Whatever weakness the Jukes represent finds its antidote in the Edwards family, which has cost the country nothing in pauperism, in crime, in hospital or asylum service.  On the contrary, it represents the highest usefulness in invention, manufacture, commerce, founding of asylums and hospitals, establishing and developing missions, projecting and energizing the best philanthropies.

CHAPTER IX

TIMOTHY EDWARDS