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Show (Released by Western Newspaper Union.) SENATOR ALDRICH AND THE NATIONAL WEALTH SOME YEARS AGO the then Sen-ator Sen-ator Aldrich of Rhode Island said to me in his office In Washington: "People would be best served if all the wealth of the nation might be controlled by, say, a dozen men. These men would realize their responsibility re-sponsibility and see to it that no one might go hungry or cold." "Yes, Senator," I replied, "that possibly might prove true if you picked the right 12 men. I presume you believe you should be one of them? I believe I should be, and the man who is sweeping Pennsylvania avenue will agree with your premise if he, too, is to be one of the 12." With a smile spreading over his usually dignified countenance, he said: "My statement was a foolish one, let's forget it." That it was foolish Is evidenced by the constantly increasing amount of national wealth and its ever-Increasing equalization among people of the nation. When that statement was made, only a limited few could own an automobile. au-tomobile. Today ther is a car for every four people in America. THE SO-CALLED RICH MAN is merely the custodian of wealth. He cannot take his accumulation with him either to heaven or to hell. He must leave it to be divided among posterity. The old adage of three generations from shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves still works. ONE OF THE ROLES OF A KING DAVID LLOYD GEORGE told me an interesting story in London in the fall of 1918. I had offered congratulations con-gratulations on his having settled the Welsh miners' strike and getting the men to go back to work, with their grievances to be settled when the war ended. "But I did not do that job," said Lloyd George. "I thought I could, for those miners are my people, but I tried and failed. It was His Majesty who accomplished what I could not. He went alone to Wales. He went to the miners' meetings, called on many of them in their homes, pled with them as one Englishman Eng-lishman to another to forget their grievances until the war was won. They went back to the mines for the king, not for me." It gave me a new idea as to what King George meant to the English Eng-lish people, and his influence with them. VON LUCKNER IT IS REPORTED that Count Felix von Luckner is in command of a German sea raider operating in the Pacific. In the first World war, Count Von Luckner commanded the Seeadler. I knew him in this country coun-try after the war. He was proud of what he had accomplished for his native country, but especially proud of not having caused the death of a single individual during all of his operations. He said he did not believe be-lieve the killing of non-combatants helped in any way in winning a war. If I had to be captured by a German raider, I should hope it might be commanded by Count Felix von Luckner. WHEN PROSPECTORS MADE FORTUNES AND CAREEBS IN THE EARLY YEARS of this century Jack Hamill and Percy Robbins were partners prospecting in the Canadian northland for gold. Later Robbins, a trained mining engineer, en-gineer, became the managing director direc-tor of one of the big gold mines at Timmins, Ontario. When we entered en-tered the first World war he, as an American citizen, returned to Chicago Chi-cago and joined the army. After the war he went to South Africa as the managing director of the De Beers diamond mines. At the time of his death some two years ago, Robbins was operating big dredges on a placer gold field at Candle, Alaska, on the shores of the Arctic ocean. Jack Hamill has been In the millionaire mil-lionaire class a dozen times, and has been broke equally as many times. Today he controls big copper cop-per mines in the northwest Canadian Cana-dian territories, and is mining pitch blend and extracting radium at Great Bear lake, beyond the Arctic circle In Canada. This represents a couple of intensely in-tensely interesting careers of men who have done things in the wide-open wide-open spaces, men who have added to the wealth of the world. They are, and were, of a type that is worth knowing. FRIENDLY AMERICA STRANGER. There is no such Individual In-dividual in any small city or town of rural America. In these places all are friends. On my first day in a town I had never visited before, each person I passea gave me a cheerful, friendly greeting. The little children told me their names and their parents' names. I was not a stranger in a strange place. I,was surrounded by friends in a place strange to me. It was the friendliness of rural America. |
