to make a scoundrel out of this man.  They were not among those who could make a dead saint of him.  Mr. Hendricks was a Christian, which made him invulnerable to violent attack.  For many years he was a Presbyterian, afterwards he became associated with the Episcopal Church.  His life began as a farmer’s boy at Shelbyville, his hands on the plough.  He was a man who hated show, a man whose counsel in Church affairs was often sought.  Men go through life, usually, with so many unconsidered ideals in its course, so many big moments in their lives that the world has never understood.

I remember I was in one of the western cities when the telegram announcing the death of Cornelius Vanderbilt came, and the appalling anxiety on all sides, for two days, was something unique in our national history.  It was an event that proved more than anything in my lifetime the financial convalescence of the nation.  When it was found that no financial crash followed the departure of the wealthiest man in America, all sensible people agreed that our recuperating prosperity as a nation was built on a rock.  It had been a fictitious state of things before this.  It was an event, which, years before, would have closed one half of the banks, and suspended hundreds of business firms.  The passing of $200,000,000 from one hand to another, at an earlier period in our history would have shaken the continent with panic and disaster.

In watching where this $200,000,000 went to, we lost sight of the million dollars bequeathed by Mr. Vanderbilt to charity.  Its destiny is worth recalling. $100,000 went to the Home and Foreign Missionary Society; $100,000 to a hospital; $100,000 to the Young Men’s Christian Association; $50,000 to the General Theological Seminary; $50,000 for Bibles and Prayer-Books; $50,000 to the Home for Incurables; $50,000 to the missionary societies for seamen; $50,000 to the Home for Intemperates; $50,000 to the Missionary Society of New York; $50,000 to the Museum of Art; $50,000 to the Museum of Natural History; and $100,000 to the Moravian Church.  While the world at large was curious about the money Mr. Vanderbilt did not give to charity, I celebrate his memory for this one consecrated million.

He was a railroad king, and they were not popular with the masses in 1885-6.  And yet, the Grand Central Depot in New York and the Union Depot in Philadelphia, were the palaces where railroad enterprise admitted the public to the crowning luxury of the age.  Men of ordinary means, of ordinary ability, could not have achieved these things.  And yet it was necessary to keep armed men in the cemetery to protect Mr. Vanderbilt’s remains.  This sort of thing had happened before.  Winter quarters were built near his tomb, for the shelter of a special constabulary.  Since A.T.  Stewart’s death, there had been no certainty as to where his remains were.  Abraham Lincoln’s sepulchre was violated.  Only a week before Mr. Vanderbilt’s death, the Phelps family vault at Binghamton, New York, was broken into.  Pinkerton detectives surrounded Mr. Vanderbilt’s body on Staten Island.  Wickedness was abroad in all directions, and there were but fifteen years of the nineteenth century left in which to redeem the past.