Personal Recollections of Andrew Carnegie (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1920 Excerpt: ...has passed, for I do not think we would have had war with Mexico anyhow. It is the example to the world. When a great Nation like ours consents to arbitrate it sets a precedent. Other great nations can do it more easily now." (I often think of these words when I remember how Grey--as afterwards Prince Lichnowsky testified--in trying to persuade Austria and Germany to arbitrate the case with Serbia referred to just such cases of successful arbitration as these of the United States and other nations.) The music began and I went back to my chair leaving Mr. Carnegie with eyes closed and Mexico and everything else forgotten. VIII VIEWS ON EDUCATION I HAD a good many talks with Mr. Carnegie on education. He had very pronounced views as everybody knows, and gave expression to them in many addresses and in his letter founding the Technical Schools at Pittsburgh. In that letter he said: "It is really astonishing how many of the world's foremost men have begun as manual laborers. The greatest of all, Shakespeare, was a wool carder; Burns, a plowman; Columbus, a sailor; Hannibal, a blacksmith; Lincoln, a rail-splitter; Grant, a turner, and I know of no better foundation from which to ascend than manual labor in youth." This last sentence was something of a creed with Mr. Carnegie and I am not sure that he ever could have come to put so high a value on cultural training as some of us do. I think he really felt that Oxford and Cambridge were wasting a very precious lot of time on the classics and philosophy, and have known him to get quite heated on this subject and sometimes to speak with considerable contempt of the whole classical curriculum. He had such a strong conviction that the first essential of training was to fit a boy to become self-supportin...