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The ‘hero’ funds provide for the recognition and compensation of those who lose their lives or receive injuries in their efforts to serve or save their fellows; the objects of the Scottish Universities fund are the improvement and expansion of the four Scottish universities and the payment of the whole or part of the class fees of students of Scottish birth or extraction; the trust deed of the United Kingdom Trust directs that the income shall be applied for the well-being of the masses of the people of Great Britain and Ireland by such means as are embraced within the meaning of the word ‘charitable’; the Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching embraces the Ten Million Dollar fund for pensions for the teachers of universities, colleges, and technical schools in the United States, Canada, and Newfoundland; the Institute of Washington was founded to ‘encourage research and discovery, and the application of knowledge to the improvement of mankind’; while the Carnegie Corporation of New York was established to support and develop the institutions which Carnegie had founded. Carnegie had a great affection for his native city. His benefactions began with public baths; then came the free library, a technical school, new baths, the purchase of the romantic Glen of Pittencrieff, and the formation of the Carnegie Dunfermline Trust. Three-quarters of a million pounds were placed in the hands of the trust ‘to bring into the lives of the toiling masses of Dunfermline more sweetness and light’.

Carnegie was installed as lord rector of St. Andrews University in 1902, and received the honorary degree of LL.D. He was also lord rector of Edinburgh University in 1906, and of Aberdeen University from 1912 to 1914. He could lay no claim to education in the scholastic sense of the term; but he showed a wonderful affinity with men of letters, and was on terms of close friendship with Gladstone, Herbert Spencer, Matthew Arnold, and especially with Viscount Morley of Blackburn. His association with these men quickened and strengthened his love for English literature, and, viewing things more from the point of view of culture than he had done in early life, he became less inclined to ‘weigh up national wealth’ in the language of commerce. A desire to live in romantic surroundings led him to purchase the estate of Skibo, of some 80,000 acres, in Sutherlandshire, where he built a mansion and delighted in maintaining the traditions of the Scottish Highland laird, his guests being led to meals by a piper.

Carnegie, who was a member of the Peace Society of Great Britain, became in 1907 the first president of the Peace Society of New York, and in 1913, when the palace of peace was opened at the Hague, he had visions of the establishment of an international court of justice. He thought Wilhelm II ‘a man of destiny’, and in 1912 had the distinction of presenting the Kaiser with ‘an address of congratulation on his peaceful reign of twenty-five years’. Two years later, in the closing chapter of his Autobiography, Carnegie wrote: ‘What a change! The world convulsed by war as never before. Men slaying each other like wild beasts.’

Carnegie died at Lenox, Massachusetts, 11 August 1919. He married in 1887 Louise, daughter of John W. Whitfield, of New York, by whom he had one daughter.

Carnegie wrote extensively, beginning with two books of travel, An American Four-in-Hand in Britain (1883) and Round the World (1884). These volumes were followed by Triumphant Democracy (1886), The Gospel of Wealth (1900), The Empire of Business (1902), Life of James Watt (1905), and Problems of To-day (1908).

A three-quarters length portrait of Carnegie by W. W. Ouless, R.A., is reproduced in Royal Academy Pictures for 1900; Edouard Lanteri executed a bust in 1907; a portrait painted by E. A. Walton, R.S.A., in 1913 belongs to the university of St. Andrews. A life-size  93