Life — April 10, 1913 — page 10: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

APRIL 19, 1913, “While there is Life there's Hope” No. i399 Published by LIFE PUBLISHING COMPANY 17 West Thirty-frst Street, New York J. A, Mirewnts. Pres’t. English Offices, Cannoo House, may be that Mr. Untermeyer’s long examination of Mr. Morgan tired him over much, but at least it left a record of him which has a value. Nobody that we know of has questioned the sincerity of Mr. Morgan's answers to Mr. Untermeyer’s queries, nor denied that they were the direct expression of what was in the old man’s mind. When he said, “ The first thing is character,” he not only meant it, but he expressed—himself. He had tremendous character. He came to be the most trusted man of his generation. Wrong he might be and doubtless often was, but not con- sciously wrong; what he believed to be right he would do whatever befel; what he believed to be just, he would have if he could get it, would give if he had it. This is character, to live sincerely according to your lights. Mr. Morgan did that, and did it with enor- mous power. Nobody else, no other rich man, was at all in his class. Along with great powers of will and intellect, he had sentiment and affection and sporting blood. He even had religion; had it very strongly. He never ceased to be a man, or degenerated into a cash reg- ister. He loved life and lived it as fully as any man of his day; loved art, loved beauty, loved people. And he got back in kind, for there was more affection for him than for any other very rich man of his time. There was a friendly feeling about him that one might have about a great, power- ful mastiff: expensive to feed; yes; but handy when anything happens! Perhaps some historian will record A. MittEr, Seo'y and Treas. eams’ Bldgs., London, E. C- that in the early years of the twentieth century the United States maintained for its protection a small standing army and Mr. J. P. Morgan. People who don't like the army didn’t like Mr. Morgan. Perhaps we shall get along without armies presently—they cost too much —as we shall have to get along with- out Mr. Morgan, who also was expen- sive. Perhaps we shall get along without strong individual characters, and a perfected world will ripple along like a poem of Wordsworth, correctly conducted by newspzpers with head- lines in very large type. But not right away! For some time to come great men and great characters will continue to be appreciated, and their faults con- doned and their maintenance conceded because we shall feel that we have to have them and they are worth their 'HE astounding story of destruction by flood and gale from Omaha to Albany has broken all records, distanced all imagined possibilities and made us feel that China has little on us now when it comes to floods. If Ohio is not stable, what is? Behold Ohio; torn, gashed, burnt, drowned and washed away! Incred- ible! And yet behold! There are the scars and the new-made graves; there are the thousands living in tents on the edge of receding waters. If such things can happen as happened to Day- ton—up to her waist in whirling wa- ters and burning in her upper stories —anything can happen, anywhere, at any time; precautions cannot prevent, and we are just in the Lord’s hands, and might as well know it. For it does not seem that these great floods in Ohio and Indiana could have betn averted by any ordinary wit of man. Forests might have lessened them, but they seem to have been due to unprecedented storms and rainfall, things we cannot hope to avert until we get control of the weather, and in that we do not pro- gress, for while we understand how it comes, and can guess what it is to be, we can’t make it. The great storms that made these disastrous floods might perfectly well have been the reflection and re- sultant of the distracted mind of con- temporary man, warring with what is, and reaching greedier than after what ought, he thinks, And may be they were; may be it was our distracted minds that made these tremendous storms. We don’t know what makes storms. We think—most of us—that there is some mind con- nected with them somewhere, and with that our minds may be connected. And that our minds might raise storms is not such a very unreasonable imagining, because the human mind is the greatest force that we observe act- ing on this Earth, And if it was the current turbulence of the human mind that, working at- mospherically, wrecked Omaha, fis- sured Indiana and drowned Ohio, set down a fair proportion of that dam- age to the suffragists, and especially to their recent rages about the white slave traffic. That, for the moment, is their best card—that and prostitution. They argue relentlessly that since white slavery exists, and prostitution still goes on, after so much male gov- ernment for so long a time, women certainly should have the vote so that they may order the world differently. If by their mental insurrection on this topic they purposely brought on the extraordinary meteorological phenom- ena we have just witnessed, it must be confessed that our women beat the Pankhursts at raising hob; but if these storms blew and rains descended with- out their conscious complicity, we in- vite them to observe that there are some other great forces of nature be- comicbooks.com N\Adete ahs 3-4,