o
the city rather than that the city should not have them. He was brave
enough to place himself in a suspicious position, that the people might
prosper.

In Eighteen Hundred Thirty, he organized "The Free School Society," to
fight the division of the school funds among sectarian schools. The idea
that any form of religion should be taught at public expense was
abhorrent to him. He was denounced as an infidel and an enemy of
society, but his purity of life and unselfish devotion to what he knew
was right were his shield and defense. The fight was kept up from
Eighteen Hundred Thirty to Eighteen Hundred Fifty-three, when it was
fixed in the statute that "no fund raised by taxation should be provided
or used for the support of any school in which any religious or
sectarian doctrine or tenet is taught, inculcated or practised." The
Free School Society was then fused with the School Board, and ceased to
exist as a separate institution. That the amalgamation was a plan to
shelve Peter Cooper's secular ideas dawned upon him later. And that the
struggle for a school free from superstition's taint was not completely
won, Peter Cooper fully realized.

During this long service on the School Board of New York City, Peter
Cooper worked out in his own mind an ideal of education which he was
unable to impress upon his fellow townsmen. No doubt their indifference
and opposition tended to crystallize his own ideas.

It will not do to say that Peter Cooper was exactly disgusted with the
public-school system of New York, for he, more than any other one man,
had evolved it and carried it forward from very meager beginnings.
Democracy is a safeguard against tyranny, but it often cramps and
hinders the man of genuine initiative. If the entire public-school
system of the State had been delegated to Peter Cooper in Eighteen
Hundred Fifty, he as sole commissioner could and would have set the
world a pace in pedagogy.

Disraeli's contention that democracy means the rule of the worst has in
it a basis of truth. Peter Cooper's appeals to his colleagues on the
School Board fell on idle ears. And so he decided to do the thing
himself, and the extent to which he would do it was to be limited only
by his fortune.

Cooper Union was to be a model for every public school in America.

* * * * *

The block bounded by Third and Fourth Avenues and the Bowery was bought
up by Peter Cooper, a lot at a time, with the idea