_August 16th._--Early in the evening of the first day of this month
the telephone brought us a paralyzing shock: my nephew, Samuel E.
Moffett, was drowned. It was while sea bathing. The seas were
running high and he was urged not to venture out, but he was a
strong swimmer and not afraid. He made the plunge with confidence,
his frightened little son looking on. Instantly he was helpless. The
great waves tossed him hither and thither, they buried him, they
struck the life out of him. In a minute it was all over.
He was forty-eight years old, he was at his best, physically and
mentally, and was well on his way toward earned distinction. He was
large-minded and large-hearted, there was no blot nor fleck upon his
character, his ideals were high and clean, and by native impulse and
without effort he lived up to them.
He had been a working journalist, an editorial writer, for nearly
thirty years, and yet in that exposed position had preserved his
independence in full strength and his principles undecayed. Several
years ago he accepted a high place on the staff of _Collier’s
Weekly_ and was occupying it when he died.
In an early chapter of my _Autobiography_, written three years ago,
I have told how he wrote from San Francisco, when he was a stripling
and asked me to help him get a berth on a daily paper there; and how
he submitted to the severe conditions I imposed, and got the berth
and kept it sixteen years.
As child and lad his health was delicate, capricious, insecure, and
his eyesight affected by a malady which debarred him from book study
and from reading. This was a bitter hardship for him, for he had a
wonderful memory and a sharp hunger for knowledge. School was not
for him, yet while still a little boy he acquired an education, and
a good one. He managed it after a method of his own devising: he got
permission to listen while the classes of the normal school recited
their abstruse lessons and black-boarded their mathematics. By
questioning the little chap it was found that he was keeping up with
the star scholars of the school.
In those days he paid us a visit in Hartford. It was when he was
about twelve years old. I was laboriously constructing an
ancient-history game at the time, to be played by my wife and
myself, and I was digging the dates and facts for it out of
cyclopædias, a dreary and troublesome business. I had sweated blood
over that work and was pardonably proud of the result, as far as I
had gone. I showed the child my mass of notes, and he was at once as
excited as I should have been over a Sunday-school picnic at his
age. He wanted to help, he was eager to help, and I was as willing
to let him as I should have been to give away an interest in a
surgical operation that I was getting tired of. I made him free of
the cyclopædias, but he never consulted them--he had their contents
in his head. All alone he built and completed the game rapidly and
without effort.
Away back in ’80 or ’81 when the grand eruption of Krakatoa, in the
Straits of Sunda, occurred, the news reached San Francisco late in
the night--too late for editors to hunt for information about that
unknown volcano in cyclopædias and write it up exhaustively and
learnedly in time for the first edition. The managing editor said,
“Send to Moffett’s home; rout him out and fetch him; he will know
all about it; he won’t need the cyclopædia.” Which was true. He came
to the office and swiftly wrote it all up without having to refer to
books.
I will take a few paragraphs from the article about him in
_Collier’s Weekly_:
If you wanted to know any fact about any subject it was quicker to
go to him than to books of reference. His good nature made him the
martyr of interruptions. In the middle of a sentence, in a hurry
hour, he would look up happily, and whether the thing you wanted
was railroad statistics or international law, he would bring it
out of one of the pigeonholes in his brain. A born dispenser of
the light, he made the giving of information a privilege and a
pleasure on all occasions.
This cyclopædic faculty was marvelous because it was only a small
part of his equipment which became invaluable in association with
other gifts. A student and a humanist, he delighted equally in
books and in watching all the workings of a political convention.
For any one of the learned professions he had conspicuous ability.
He chose that which, in the cloister of the editorial rooms, makes
fame for others. Any judge or Cabinet Minister of our time may
well be proud of a career of such usefulness as his. Men with such
a quality of mind as Moffett’s are rare.
Anyone who discussed with him the things he advocated stood a
little awed to discover that here was a man who had carefully
thought out what would be best for all the people in the world two
or three generations hence, and guided his work according to that
standard. This was the one broad subject that covered all his
interests; in detail they included the movement for universal
peace about which he wrote repeatedly; so small a thing as a plan
to place flowers on the window sills and fire escapes of New York
tenement houses enlisted not only the advocacy of his pen, but his
direct personal presence and co-operation; again and again, in his
department in this paper, he gave indorsement and aid to similar
movements, whether broad or narrow in their scope--the saving of
the American forests, fighting tuberculosis, providing free meals
for poor school children in New York, old-age pensions, safety
appliances for protecting factory employees, the beautifying of
American cities, the creation of inland waterways, industrial
peace.
He leaves behind him wife, daughter, and son--inconsolable mourners.
The son is thirteen, a beautiful human creature, with the broad and
square face of his father and his grandfather, a face in which one
reads high character and intelligence. This boy will be
distinguished, by and by, I think.
In closing this slight sketch of Samuel E. Moffett I wish to dwell
with lingering and especial emphasis upon the dignity of his
character and ideals. In an age when we would rather have money than
health, and would rather have another man’s money than our own, he
lived and died unsordid; in a day when the surest road to national
greatness and admiration is by showy and rotten demagoguery in
politics and by giant crimes in finance, he lived and died a
gentleman.