Nach dem Tote

The will of the deceased Hugo Stinnes, "King of Coke," was read but not published. According to report his entire fortune was left to his widow, Frau Klaire Stinnes, nee Wagenknecht; but the direction of his vast estate was placed in the hands of his two eldest sons, Dr. Edmund Hugo Stinnes and Hugo Hermann Stinnes, the former to be in charge of the Ruhr and Rhineland properties, the latter to oversee the family's interests in Berlin, run the shipping business and care for foreign properties.

The dead giant of industry admonished his children to refrain from quarrels, appointed their mother sole arbiter of their disputes.

The Stinnes fortune was not appraised, but financial circles on the Berlin Borse estimated it at $500,000,000.

On the day of Hugo Stinnes' funeral, Maximilian Harden, German Socialist writer, had published his latest volume of Kopfe (heads), a series of character sketches of great German men of the present time. Herr Harden in discussing the "King of Coke" admires his financial genius but despises his political ability.

The power of Stinnes over the German mind is shown in Harden's book, by an imaginary dialogue between two men-in-the-street. They declare in all seriousness that Stinnes has proposed to convert the Papacy into a company called "St. Peter's Successors, Limited" with which is to be amalgamated "the Russian Greek Orthodox Church and affiliated in the form of a religious syndicate with other religious organizations in- cluding the Tibetan Lama Church, and that he has plans for establishing a paper factory in the Vatican grounds and founding a moving picture city near Rome which shall completely eclipse Los Angeles."

Other things which the imaginary couple say: "He owns half of East Prussia, a large part of Sweden, the waterfront at Bremen, Hamburg and Copenhagen and the lion's share of stock in the fattest enterprises throughout the world."

"He will fight tooth and nail against the oil interests that are seeking to grab the world, until he finally gets control of the major portion of the world's oil production or else exploits it advantageously for himself in a trust in which his fellow members are Rockefeller, Rothschild, Sinclair, Urquhart, Kemal Pasha and the Soviet Governments of Baku and Batum."

Harden also gives interesting side-lights on Stinnes from the lips of the late Albert Ballin, famed head of the Hamburg-American Steamship Line. After a meeting at which Harden had introduced Stinnes to Ballin, the latter said: "Stinnes is the greatest of the Rhineland captains of industry; but just as some children cannot leave a crumb of cake, and some men cannot leave a woman alone, so Stinnes cannot keep his hands off a single business undertaking even when it belongs to another."

Animadverting upon the Stinnes ch?iacter, Harden writes: "Does broad, wild, smiling Nature delight him? I am not sure. I rather believe that if a magician had whisked him to a high Himalayan plateau he would instantly have begun studying its geological and economic possi- bilities."

Concluding, the author says that Stinnes could not realize that "flexibility of mind is not weakness; that the'"strongest also can be the most polite, and that lust for unbounded international commercial power is irreconcilable with nationalistic politics."