Page:A History of the University of Chicago by Thomas Wakefield Goodspeed.djvu/61

THE PREPARING OF THE WAY 35 had been unfolded to him several years earlier. Dr. Strong was for nearly half a century one of the most honored, respected, and influential leaders of his denomination. In learning, in dignity of person and character, in firmness of conviction, in force of will, in vigor and beauty of literary style, no man in that denomi- nation surpassed him. His great educational scheme came to possess him. He urged it upon Mr. Rockefeller with the utmost reach of his power of persuasion. He enlisted all the resources of his great denominational influence in his aid. Older by a few years than Mr. Rockefeller, he did not shrink from urging the scheme upon him as a duty, devolving, not on him in con- junction with others, but on him alone. The scheme required an initial gift of five million dollars with an additional million each year for fifteen years, twenty millions in all. Mr. Rockefeller shrank from discouraging Dr. Strong by a formal, definite, and final refusal. This indeed he never gave. Through 1887 Dr. Strong's letters were frequent and became more and more urgent, so urgent indeed that Mr. Rockefeller finally wrote as follows on November 30, 1887: For all the reasons I have decided to indefinitely postpone the question of the university or theological seminary in New York. This was the nearest he came to a refusal to grant Dr. Strong's large requests. While Dr. Strong failed to get his great university in New York, it is nevertheless true that a great university was founded by Mr. Rockefeller, founded in a great city, founded by gifts aggregating far more in the end than twenty million dollars, founded mainly as a graduate institution, and founded under Baptist auspices. Dr. Strong's dream of a great graduate university was therefore realized. If not founded in New York, it was located in what was believed to be a more needy and promising field, and under the leadership of a president whose magnetism, energy, temperament, and training pre-eminently fitted him for the great work to be done. How far Mr. Rockefeller was influenced to do what he ultimately did in establishing a great university by Dr. Strong's many years of advocacy of a university in New York no one knows it is quite likely not even Mr. Rockefeller himself. The future historian