Some one has revealed to the TRIBUNE that I once suggested to Rev. Thomas K.
Beecher, of Elmira, New York, that we get up a monument to Adam, and that Mr.
Beecher favored the project. There is more to it than that. The matter started as a joke, but
it came somewhat near to materializing.
It is long ago--thirty years. Mr. Darwin's DESCENT OF MAN has been in print five or
six years, and the storm of indignation raised by it was still raging in pulpits and
periodicals. In tracing the genesis of the human race back to its sources, Mr. Darwin had
left Adam out altogether. We had monkeys, and "missing links," and plenty of other
kinds of ancestors, but no Adam. Jesting with Mr. Beecher and other friends in Elmira, I
said there seemed to be a likelihood that the world would discard Adam and accept the
monkey, and that in the course of time Adam's very name would be forgotten in the earth;
therefore this calamity ought to be averted; a monument would accomplish this, and
Elmira ought not to waste this honorable opportunity to do Adam a favor and herself a
credit.
Then the unexpected happened. Two bankers came forward and took hold of the matter--
not for fun, not for sentiment, but because they saw in the monument certain commercial
advantages for the town. The project had seemed gently humorous before--it was more
than that now, with this stern business gravity injected into it. The bankers discussed the
monument with me. We met several times. They proposed an indestructible memorial, to
cost twenty-five thousand dollars. The insane oddity of a monument set up in a village to
preserve a name that would outlast the hills and the rocks without any such help, would
advertise Elmira to the ends of the earth-- and draw custom. It would be the only
monument on the planet to Adam, and in the matter of interest and impressiveness could
never have a rival until somebody should set up a monument to the Milky Way.
People would come from every corner of the globe and stop off to look at it, no tour of
the world would be complete that left out Adam's monument. Elmira would be a Mecca;
there would be pilgrim ships at pilgrim rates, pilgrim specials on the continent's railways;
libraries would be written about the monument, every tourist would kodak it, models of it
would be for sale everywhere in the earth, its form would become as familiar as the
figure of Napoleon.
One of the bankers subscribed five thousand dollars, and I think the other one subscribed
half as much, but I do not remember with certainty now whether that was the figure or
not. We got designs made-- some of them came from Paris.
In the beginning--as a detail of the project when it was yet a joke-- I had framed a humble
and beseeching and perfervid petition to Congress begging the government to built the
monument, as a testimony of the Great Republic's gratitude to the Father of the Human
Race and as a token of her loyalty to him in this dark day of humiliation when his older
children were doubting and deserting him. It seemed to me that this petition ought to be
