ts usefulness in many ways, and especially
(being no longer dependent for annual income upon rents) to utilize the
whole of the building for educational purposes. Yet the total endowment
will still be modest, as compared with that of many similar institutions
of later origin.

[8] Old New Yorkers will be reminded of the closing lines of Fitz-Greene
Halleck's poem,--

"And there is music twice a week
On Scudder's balcony."

[9] There may have been more than a mere sentimental regret in his mind
at that time; for his inventive intuition had struck out half a century
before an idea to which the slow thought of his fellows had not yet
attained,--the plan of utilizing roofs for the purpose of giving to all
classes an ownership of free air and far distance and boundless sky as
complete as any landowner could command by fencing off a mountain for
his own pleasure. As he looked down upon the vast wilderness of roofs
and thought of the multitude laboring beneath them or trudging through
the streets ("up one canyon and down another," as old Jim Bridger the
scout said in St. Louis), ignorant of the upper sphere within reach, he
might well have felt that one part of his original scheme would still be
a physical and moral boon to the metropolis. In fact the disappearance
of the "vacant lots," so numerous in his youth, and so freely available
as informal parks and playgrounds, had created new necessity for air and
space. Whether he consciously recalled the hanging gardens of Babylon,
or the flat roofs universally utilized for social and domestic purposes
in eastern and southern countries, I do not know. At all events he had
seized upon a similar idea, and now--nearly a score of years after his
death--we are waking up to its value. Even the Cooper Union building
some day, after more pressing needs of equipment shall have been
satisfied, may be crowned with its garden of rest and outlook.

[10] Of the original board, Peter Cooper was the first to pass away. Mr.
Hunt and Mr. Tiemann have since died, and Mr. R. Fulton Cutting has been
elected a trustee. The other vacancies have not been filled.

VIII

NATIONAL POLITICS

PETER COOPER'S prominent activity in national politics belongs to two
periods,--that of the war for the Union, and that of the subsequent
controversies over questions of financial policy.

As has been explained, he felt his life to be peculiarly identified with
that of the nation bor