debt of Mexico, amounting to one hundred and ten million dollars, was converted. In 1900 the firm took the lead in helping to supply Great Britain with war money, placing twelve million dollars of bonds in this country, and since then it has taken part of several other foreign loans.

These are only a few of the achievements of Mr. Morgan and his firm. A history of J. P. Morgan & Company for the last six years would constitute a fairly complete history of Wall street, and, indeed, of finance in the United States.

Business by no means absorbs all of Mr. Morgan's energy. Perhaps his first interest outside of his work is his enthusiasm as a collector of works of art. He is the possessor of many famous paintings and is interested in rare china, Limoges ware particularly. As evidences of his taste he has gathered and presented a collection of fabrics to Cooper Union, of rare gems to the American Museum of Natural History, of Greek ornaments to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Yachting is his diversion, and he superintended the building of his steam yacht Corsair in every detail. For a long time he was commodore of the New York Yacht Club, to which he recently presented the land for a new club house. After a hard siege at business Mr. Morgan goes for a cruise, and it is related that he often takes with him a mass of papers, and that when his friends look for him he is to be found below deck buried deep in figures, utterly oblivious to his surroundings. Fond of a fine dinner, a connoisseur in wines, and a judge of cigars, he is temperate in all these. Caring little for society, he occasionally enjoys a quiet party, and may warm into talkativeness, though never on business subjects. Anyone who has seen him at the dinners of the New England Society knows that he enjoys them. There he will sometimes join in the singing, but it is very rarely that he makes a speech. None of his few intimate friends are among his business associates. The outward mark of esteem which Mr. Morgan bestows upon a man is to present him with a collie dog from the kennels of his country home. A member of many clubs, he is too busy to be much of a club man, but he has always been a churchgoer, and what is more, a church worker, being a vestryman of St. George's Church in Stuyvesant square, and the unfailing friend and helper of its rector, the Rev. Dr. Rainsford. He has taken especial inter

est in the boys of the church, has helped devise means to keep them off the street and to teach them trades, and sometimes he attends the evening sessions of their club and talks to them. Two of his known philanthropies have been the establishment, at a cost of over five hundred thousand dollars, of the now well known New York Trade School in the upper east side of New York, and the founding of a smaller trade school in connection with St. George's Church.

Mr. Morgan has also given to Harvard University for the Medical School one million dollars; for a great lying-in hospital near St. George's Church, one million three hundred and fifty thousand dollars; for St. John's Cathedral, five hundred thousand dollars; for help toward paying the debts of the Young Men's Christian Association, one hundred thousand dollars; for the Loomis Hospital for Consumptives, some five hundred thousand dollars; for a library in Holyoke, Massachusetts (his father's birthplace), one hundred thousand dollars; for preserving the Palisades along the Hudson river, one hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars; for a new parish house and rectory for St. George's Church, three hundred thousand dollars. He also contributed largely to the Queen Victoria memorial fund and to the Galveston relief fund; he presented St. Paul's Cathedral in London with a complete electric plant, and built a hospital at Aix-les-Bains, France.

And this is J. Pierpont Morgan, a powerful factor in one of the greatest departments of human activity, a man endowed with extraordinary energy and capacity, who has trampled forward in his own rough way, asking neither sympathy nor advice; who has been widely trusted and feared, little liked and much abused; who has attained great wealth, which he neither needed nor desired, except as a tool to carve a way to greater achievements; who has worked prodigiously in short, a man who has lived his life and fought his fight to the limit of his power.

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HOW GREAT THINGS ARE DONE.

CERTAIN French preacher, whenever he appears in the pulpit of Notre Dame, draws all the élite of Paris to hear him; so fascinating, eloquent, and polished are his discourses. How comes he to acquire this power? He

delivers but five or six sermons in the year, generally in the season of Lent, and then retires to his convent, to spend the rest of the year in reading and study, and in preparing his half dozen sermons for the next season.

A preacher may compose fifty sermons in the year; but then there will not be a masterpiece among them. Dr. Wayland took two years to compose his famous sermon on foreign missions; but then it is a masterpiece, worth a ton of ordinary sermons. An eminent lawyer who, without any uncommon oratorical gifts, won nearly every case in which he was engaged, upon being asked how he did it, replied: "I learn all that can be learned of each case before it comes into court."

After dictating an argument to Boswell, who was preparing to speak before a committee of the House of Commons, Dr. Johnson said very wisely to him: "This you must enlarge on, when speaking to the committee. You must not argue there as if you were arguing in the schools; close reasoning will not fix their attention; you must say the same thing over and over again in different words. If you say it but once, they miss it, in a moment of inattention. It is unjust, sir, to censure lawyers for multiplying words when they argue; it is often necessary for them to multiply words."

Perhaps the success of the great lawyers is largely owing to the same practice as that of the great preachers. The great aim of the latter is to make their point clear, and impress it on the minds of their hearers by every means in their power. "All great preachers," says Professor Tucker, "succeed by ceaseless reiteration, under constantly varying forms, of a few conceptions that have become supreme in their experience."

If one should be asked to give an example of a man of genius who, from want of steady application to work, failed to produce what might reasonably be expected of him, he would probably be at a loss, for a moment, which among many examples to choose. The name of Coleridge would probably come first to mind; but disease and opium had much to do with his sad inactivity. He was a man of uncommon genius; everything he has written bears the stamp of genius; but his will aye, that had nothing of the character of genius in it; his will was wretchedly weak, and this was the cause of all his trouble. He planned many things, but accomplished few. He would