M. Taylor Pyne

Moses Taylor Pyne was an active lawyer, trustee of important estates and railway and bank director of the old conservative school; but he was fortunate in being better known to the community for his benefactions than for his achievement of professional success or wealth. He was one of the New Yorkers who contributed not only money but arduous personal service to the enterprises of public welfare in which his mind was absorbed. Foremost among these was his Alma Mater, Princeton University, to the promotion of whose interests and prosperity he gave the best of himself during the whole of his active life, whose trustee board meetings he never once missed in thirty-six years and in whose neighborhood he fixed his permanent home twenty-six years ago.

This strong personal loyalty of mature years to the institution of learning from which a young man had been sent out for his first contact with the hurly-burly of every-day business life used to be thought of as a sentiment which peculiarly marked the Englishman of Eton, Rugby, Oxford, and Cambridge. Perhaps we may have learned during recent years, not only from such personal histories as this but from the magnificent rally of the alumni of half a dozen American colleges, in the face of business reaction and hard times, to equip their Alma Mater for a larger career of usefulness, something more than we knew before, regarding that side of the American character also.

Alexander Dana Noyes
1922 Century Association Yearbook