The Big Four

The modern Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress) has no Dlchterbund (literally, league of poets--school) to interpret national aspirations. It has produced neither a Schiller nor a Goethe, but it has created a Herr Hugo Stinnes.

Dr. Ludwig Stein, for 20 years foreign editor of the Vossische Zeitung, a professor of the University of Berne in Switzerland, made some interesting comments upon "the master of coke" in an address last week in Manhattan. Said he: "Give me two hours with my old friend, Hugo Stinnes and we will make peace better than you statesmen can make in two years. . . Stinnes is the mightiest personage in the German Empire. The Rockefeller of Germany has accepted no other title than that he gave himself--'the ironmaster.' . . . Stinnes never was an admirer of the Kaiser. In 1913 he refused to participate in the presentation of a memorial because, as he said to me, he considered the Kaiser as the biggest misfortune of the German Empire. . . . He lives in a modest little house in Berlin--the same house that was occupied by his parents. He dresses with almost studied simplicity. . . . August Thyssen, next to Stinnes, is the greatest business man in Germany." The next in order of greatness, he said, are Herren Carl Friedrich Siemens, head of the electrical industry, and Felix Deutsch, brother-in-law of Otto H. Kahn. These four men, said Dr. Stein, form the "Big Four in German Industry."