Edmond Kelly

Edmond Kelly was a dweller in two lands; born in France and liberally educated first at Columbia and then at English Cambridge, he returned to Columbia for legal study, practised at our bar while professing the science of politics in his Alma Mater, then in Paris and again in America. Wherever he lived and worked he was a commanding personality, eminent in his profession and controlling enormous interests, eminent likewise as a scholar and prolific writer on social subjects, eminent as a teacher and pre-eminent as a social reformer. Comfortable in fortune by reason of his hard-earned income, he yet pitied the outcast and submerged with profound emotion. As speaker, writer and, generally, as agitator and reformer he pleaded their cause in season and out of season. Seventeen years a member here, he was but fifty-eight at death. He may be said to have worn himself out in the service of help to the helpless. Attractive and winning in presence, daring and adroit in conversation, upright and self-sacrificing, he was equally at home in these rooms and in the lodging houses of the east side of New York, a scholar, a patriot, a lover of men.

William Milligan Sloane
1910 Century Association Yearbook