Awful Presence

Fear and Loyalty are the tests of Power. Men fear or are loyal to what they believe is strong. Today, measured by the tests of fear and loyalty, there is one man just three years dead last week, whose awful presence is stronger than the prestige of any living statesmen.

Statesmen Coolidge, Baldwin, Poincare, Stresemann, even Mussolini, have invoked with respect to Mexico, Nicaragua, India, China, Tibet, Java and most of the earth's troubled lands, fear of all the spectre stands for. Asia is troubled by it, vaguely wondering if in loyalty to this presence perhaps lies union, strength and conquest.

Today those ultra-conservative news organs, the London and the New York Times, sneak, though with reluctance, of Vladimir Ilvich Ulyanov Lenin as a man whom History will dub "The Great." But biographers would reflect: A child, he was one of the six children of a starved schoolmaster. A man, he lived for years expatriate and struggling outside the country he loved. A Power, he died paralyzed and speechless (Jan. 21, 1924).