Page:Americans (1922).djvu/273

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him by gifts of buildings or endowment funds to five hundred educational institutions at home and abroad and by his great central foundation with its liberal charter for "the advancement and diffusion of knowledge and understanding among the people of the United States."

Some of us criticized him because he did not give away his three hundred and fifty millions stealthily and secretly, as we slip a quarter into the collection box, God alone being aware of our munificence. But he knew that one of the most important of his benefactions was precisely the publicity with which he restored his vast accumulations to the people and put them at the service of the upward-striving members of society. It was for him to declare conspicuously and with magnificent and unmistakable emphasis what money is good for; to promote science and literature and music and peace and heroism. He owed the friendship, he tells us, of Earl Grey, who later became a trustee of the ten-million-dollar fund for the United Kingdom, to the publication in the Times of these sentences from his instructions to the trustees of his gifts to Dunfermline:

To bring into the monotonous lives of the toiling masses of Dunfermline more "of sweetness and light," to give them—especially the young—some charm, some happiness, some elevating conditions of life which residence elsewhere would have denied, that the child of my native town, looking back in after years, however far from home it may have