The $30,000 Bequest, and Other Stories
Page 40
A MONUMENT TO ADAM
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 toAdam, and that Mr. Beecher favored the project. There is more to itthan that. The matter started as a joke, but it came somewhat near tomaterializing.
It is long ago--thirty years. Mr. Darwin's _Descent of Man_ has been inprint five or six years, and the storm of indignation raised by it wasstill raging in pulpits and periodicals. In tracing the genesis of thehuman race back to its sources, Mr. Darwin had left Adam out altogether.We had monkeys, and "missing links," and plenty of other kinds ofancestors, but no Adam. Jesting with Mr. Beecher and other friends inElmira, I said there seemed to be a likelihood that the world woulddiscard Adam and accept the monkey, and that in the course of timeAdam's very name would be forgotten in the earth; therefore thiscalamity ought to be averted; a monument would accomplish this, andElmira ought not to waste this honorable opportunity to do Adam a favorand herself a credit.
Then the unexpected happened. Two bankers came forward and took hold ofthe matter--not for fun, not for sentiment, but because they saw in themonument certain commercial advantages for the town. The project hadseemed gently humorous before--it was more than that now, with thisstern business gravity injected into it. The bankers discussed themonument with me. We met several times. They proposed an indestructiblememorial, to cost twenty-five thousand dollars. The insane oddity of amonument set up in a village to preserve a name that would outlast thehills and the rocks without any such help, would advertise Elmira to theends of the earth--and draw custom. It would be the only monument on theplanet to Adam, and in the matter of interest and impressiveness couldnever have a rival until somebody should set up a monument to the MilkyWay.
People would come from every corner of the globe and stop off to lookat it, no tour of the world would be complete that left out Adam'smonument. Elmira would be a Mecca; there would be pilgrim ships atpilgrim rates, pilgrim specials on the continent's railways; librarieswould be written about the monument, every tourist would kodak it,models of it would be for sale everywhere in the earth, its form wouldbecome as familiar as the figure of Napoleon.
One of the bankers subscribed five thousand dollars, and I think theother one subscribed half as much, but I do not remember with certaintynow whether that was the figure or not. We got designs made--some ofthem came from Paris.
In the beginning--as a detail of the project when it was yet a joke--Ihad framed a humble and beseeching and perfervid petition to Congressbegging the government to build the monument, as a testimony of theGreat Republic's gratitude to the Father of the Human Race and as atoken of her loyalty to him in this dark day of humiliation when hisolder children were doubting and deserting him. It seemed to me thatthis petition ought to be presented, now--it would be widely andfeelingly abused and ridiculed and cursed, and would advertise ourscheme and make our ground-floor stock go off briskly. So I sent itto General Joseph R. Hawley, who was then in the House, and he said hewould present it. But he did not do it. I think he explained that whenhe came to read it he was afraid of it: it was too serious, to gushy,too sentimental--the House might take it for earnest.
We ought to have carried out our monument scheme; we could have managedit without any great difficulty, and Elmira would now be the mostcelebrated town in the universe.
Very recently I began to build a book in which one of the minorcharacters touches incidentally upon a project for a monument to Adam,and now the _Tribune _has come upon a trace of the forgotten jest ofthirty years ago. Apparently mental telegraphy is still in business. Itis odd; but the freaks of mental telegraphy are usually odd.