Ottumwa tri-weekly courier. [volume] (Ottumwa, Iowa) 1903-1916, 1908-07-14

s~stA 49, Mn
bined, of a pastoral people, and then,
divorcing law from religion in fact,
yet in theory applied the old combin-
alton to the churches of an Industrial
world.
He saw that as the area of the
physical was enlarged by mans ma
terial inventions, a larger conception,
a wider vision of the ultimate power
was a necessity to mankind, since it
had reached a point where it must
either leap forward or fall backwards.
He had been through experiences
so unusual, a fight so terrific, that he
had harvested in two years the phil
osophy which most men only acquire
at the end of life, and a sense OF pro.
portion which few men ever acquire
at all. That of proportion which
discriminates between pin pricks and
sword thrusts, and refuses to take
trivial things, seriously, wasting Meth
er laughter nor tears, SO that they
may both be ready in the hour of
need.
And when he came into the baro-
netcy, and, better still, a fame worthy
to be laid at her feet, Lady Kitty
found in his restful philosophy mo-
dyne for her most restless moods. in
his poetical fervor a stimulant for her
duller moments.
But how the strange boy she had
known at Oxford had matured so
swiftly into an interesting personality
remained n of the mysteries which
sent that puzzled look into her won
dering eyes.
And V~andraken- poor Vandraken!
was onl ythe victim of distort-
ed economic forces, the bye-product
of laws made in the day when men
could not, by any possible chance,
have anticipated such conditions of
life as exist today, did not live in
vain.
He had made his material wealth
the common denomination of his life,
and tried to square his world, as he
found it. with that figure. Who shall
blame him? With his material envir-
onment and upbringing, he could hard
ly have done otherwise. His life may
been a hand held up in warning
to the generations which followed
behind. He himself seems to have re-
allied this possibility, for the day
which followed the bursting of the
storm of consequence, and preceded
his death, had been spent in drawing
up a will.
He left the bulk of his wealth to
trustees, among whom were Lord An
cester and Dashmore, who were to
employ it as the nucleus of a fund for
obtaining legislation, by amendments
to the Constitution of the United
CtotnS which chn,1l ,na1-o "a ir,roc.
sible in the future for any man to give
in his lifetime, or bequeath by will,
to any individual or corporation, a
greater sum than two million dollars.
In order to obtain this legislation
he pointed out that money must be
used unsparingly to outbid the men
who were interested in concentrating
wealth; in their offer of the services
of the legal talent of the country.
These men, he realized, had not used
their knowledge of the laws of the
country to defeat its own purposes be-
cause they hated their country, but
because they loved money.
Through his contact with Won Tar
senheim, who knew human nature as
only the Saturn type can know it.
and say it in perspective, and, like
strange being, having for a time
conscience, his brain looked at an
humanity in the cold,
clear light of materialism.
He recognized the futility of over
looking the obvious truth, that the
advance in material Gre
and comforts has to some ex-
tent outbid the spiritual forces and
their promises, which once held men
straight, and urged them to self-sac-
that the increased level of hui
honesty and principle has not
kept pace with the great bribe fund
or temptation, in the hands of the low
er forces.
The solution, as he saw it, was a
corresponding increase in the prom
ises of religion, or else a material
bride fund in the hands of those who
were on the side of law, which could
the predatory class which had
up. This fund his will offered
to provide.
He suggested that the President of
the Republic would be the ideal per-
son to WELD this fund, if only the Re
public could find an ideal President.
He pointed out in this connection that.
it was the knowledge of it's own imper-
which had driven men to re-
sort to kings, who should protect
them against themselves; that certain
men, believing that they had out
grown these i~mperfections, had estab-
a republic. Being uncertain
whether they really had outgrown
their i~mperfections, they were afraid
to elect one of themselves to rule,
except in the most tentative fashion,
so that when they did find an ideal
President they could not keep him.
Therefore, he wished his trustees to
endeavor to obtain an amendment to
the Constitution which should give
the people the power to make the of
fee Of president permanent (subject
to impeachment when they found a
who was fitted to rule. When
a man was found, they were to
endow him with the vast fortune he
was leaving behind.
Thus the concentrated wealth which
the death of Standish Vandraken'
will shortly put into the hands of those