Between the Devil and the Democrats

VOLUME 156

NUMBER 6

DECEMBER 1935

BY JOHN W. OWENS

THE question is this: Can they organize a posse and whip it into fury after the horse has been returned to the stable and the door has been banged, barred, and bolted?

The policy of the Republican strategists, planning the 1936 campaign against Mr. Roosevelt, is to bear down with unearthly solemnity upon the threat to the Constitution which is embodied in Mr. Roosevelt, his administration, and his works. Yet the plain fact is that Mr. Roosevelt’s threat to the Constitution is a thing of the past, and if that immortal document is to take on mortality in the visible future it will be because of conditions and circumstances that have little or no relation to that somewhat elusively contradictory body of doctrine known as the New Deal.

In the first place, there is not the remotest danger to-day that the Supreme Court will leave the back door of the Constitution open for the entrance of wreckers. There is not the remotest danger that the Supreme Court will feebly give its validation to legislation that is out of line with the familiar and conventional constitutional pattern. If anything, the danger to-day is that the Supreme Court will be so zealously on guard against legislation which might subvert the constitutional foundations that it may give the lie to the Constitutionalists who assure us that growth and adjustment to all changing conditions are possible within the principles given by those elders whom the late Mr. Harding loved to describe as the Founding Fathers. In time, caution usually corresponds to danger. Mr. Roosevelt undertook to ride roughshod, in various respects, over constitutional principles that are as old as the nation. And for a time the Federal courts were very tender in their attitude. Much could be done of an unusual and, indeed, of an unprecedented character in time of emergency — provided remedies were as temporary as emergencies were assumed to be. But when remedies ceased to be remedies for emergencies and began to burgeon forth into permanent principles and policies of a nature beyond the ken of those Founding Fathers, when the Brain Trusters began to lay down blueprints for radical reorganization of our ways of living and of transacting business, the Supreme Court prepared for its hour. The fervor with which the nine members of that august tribunal deposited the NRA in the charnel house of laws was not the fervor of mere legal technicians. It was the fervor of sentries on duty in a wild night and forewarned of invasion. And the danger that the sentries may drift into the mood to shoot first and ask questions later was plainly suggested, if suggestion were needed, in the vehemence with which the Chief Justice assailed the attitude of the majority of the court in the railroad pension case.

Copyright 1935, by The Atlantic Monthly Company, Boston, Mass. All rights reserved.

No, the danger that Mr. Roosevelt would successfully attack the Constitution from the rear is a thing of the past. In fact, many of the very gentlemen who are foremost in demanding that the Constitution be protected against Mr. Roosevelt’s machinations are also foremost in predicting that scarcely anything at all will be left of Mr. Roosevelt’s legislation by the time the Supreme Court prepares for the summer holidays of 1936. If their forecasts are anywhere near sound, the death rate among the legislative children of the New Deal will be terrific, and, come next July, we shall be right back in that happy governmental state in which Mr. Hoover left us, plus rather substantial additions to the large deficits with which he unwittingly and unwillingly made smooth the way of the numerous varieties of American Keynesians whose motto is: ‘When in doubt, spend some money!’

II

If Mr. Roosevelt is helpless at the back door of the Constitution, what shall be said of his prospects at the front door? There are forty-eight states in this Union and thirteen of them can prevent amendment of the Constitution. A clear three-fourths majority of the states is necessary. And the thirteen states that can prevent amendment of the Constitution may be governed, in their action on proposed amendments, by provisions in their own constitutions which may permit a minority of popular opinion to control. The usual procedure in the states is that an amendment to the Federal Constitution must be given approval by a majority in each branch of the Legislature, and frequently the State Senate is weighted in favor of small communities. What would any political diagnostician say of Mr. Roosevelt’s prospects of commanding the support of the six New England states for an amendment of the Constitution to validate legislation upon which the Supreme Court had placed its taboo? Not only is there the Rhode Island election; there is the well-known fact that the Democratic high command in Washington is in a state approaching despondency when it contemplates New England. And what would any diagnostician of politics have to say about the Atlantic seaboard states below New England? About New York? About Pennsylvania, where the New Deal Governor Earle lately lost a battle for revision of the state constitution ? About Maryland, about Delaware, and about Virginia, both of whose Democratic Senators are in open revolt against the administration without any apparent danger of political extinction?

Nothing is easier than to count thirteen states in which Mr. Roosevelt must fight for his life in straightout poll by heads, free of all the special rules and restrictions, all the deliberately placed barriers to hasty action, that lie in the way of steps to approve amendments to the Federal Constitution. No wonder the Republican strategists plead with Mr. Roosevelt, as a candid man, to tell the people exactly what he proposes in amendments and, alternately, attempt to taunt him into some declaration! No wonder Mr. Roosevelt and his spokesmen offer unimpeachable generalizations that the Constitution was made for man, and not man for the Constitution, and hedge with consummate skill whenever anyone begins to ask, ‘But exactly what do you mean?’

Of course, it is said that Mr. Roosevelt may pack the Supreme Court, and thus provide new and strange constitutional interpretations that will, in effect, drastically alter the great charter. But, passing over the pertinent question as to whether at some future date Mr. Roosevelt would be able to push through Congress revolutionary legislation to be validated by a packed Supreme Court, it will be observed by persons of calm mind that packing the Supreme Court is more easily talked about than done. One thing that stands in the way is the fact that the Supreme Court of the United States is probably the most superb health resort in the United States. The members of that court must be the despair of insurance actuaries. Many of them live to incredible ages, and they are not given to resignations or to early retirements. Seldom does a President have enough appointments to make any profound impression upon the collective thought of the court. Woodrow Wilson in eight years appointed but three members — Louis D. Brandeis, James C. McReynolds, and John H. Clarke. The Harding-Coolidge régime did have the appointment of five members, or a majority, but one was due to the almost unprecedented retirement to private life of a junior member. And Mr. Roosevelt passed the halfway mark of his administration without having a sign of a chance to appoint a single member.

Another fact to be kept in mind is that the members of the court by no means reflect the views of the President who appoints. President Wilson, liberal Democrat, saw Justice McReynolds turn out to be a stanch conservative. The ultraconservative Calvin Coolidge is responsible for the presence on the bench of the pronounced liberal, Harlan F. Stone. And when President Hoover appointed Chief Justice Charles E. Hughes, he doubtless shared the opinion of liberal critics that Mr. Hughes was an ultraconservative, which was one time that Mr. Hoover and his critics found themselves together, to find later that they were together only to be wrong.

Further to illustrate this aspect of the matter, let us assume that Mr. Roosevelt will have one or two appointments to the Supreme Court in the next eighteen months, and let us assume that there is truth in the Washington gossip that the Democratic leader in the Senate, Joseph T. Robinson, is to be rewarded (as the saying is) with a seat on the Supreme Court. Is there a single seasoned political observer in Washington who believes for one second that Mr. Robinson would be, as a justice of the Supreme Court, the faithful champion and spokesman of the administration’s policies that he has been as the leader of Mr. Roosevelt’s party in Congress? Is there any reason in the history of our public men, or in the character of Mr. Robinson, to believe that he would remain the advocate after being placed in a judicial office? The chances are heavy against it.

It is possible, to be sure, that a single appointment by President Roosevelt would shift the prevailing tendencies of opinion in the court and perhaps strengthen what is known as the liberal group, and it is possible that this might affect the fate of some important piece of New Deal legislation. But to think of this possibility in terms of subversion of the Constitution, through complacency of the Supreme Court, is to surrender to incoherency of mind. Commonly, the liberal group of the court is supposed to consist of Chief Justice Hughes, Justice Brandeis, Justice Stone, and Justice Cardozo, with Justice Roberts inclined toward that group, but sometimes veering toward the conservative group composed of Justice Van Devanter, Justice McReynolds, Justice Sutherland, and Justice Butler. An appointment by President Roosevelt might conceivably swing the court in favor of some item of New Deal legislation in one of the famous five-tofour decisions. But would the validation of an item of New Deal legislation by the vote of a Roosevelt appointee, added to the votes of, say, the veterans Hughes, Brandeis, Stone, and Cardozo, have any special significance? Would it suggest that the new tail to the liberal group had wagged the old dog? The decision would, of course, take its place in the record with other five-to-four decisions. It might be right or it might be wrong; it might be wise or it might be unwise. But we should definitely be acting within the constitutional system and we should be in no more peril than we have been after any or all of the other five-to-four decisions in our history.

Boiled down, then, the fight of the Republican strategists to save the Constitution is a fight to save the safest thing in the United States. The Supreme Court has proved by its acts that it cannot be overawed and it cannot be overwhelmed. It has proved that it means to guard the Constitution. And Mr. Roosevelt has no practical prospect whatever either of changing the Constitution to overcome adverse decisions of the Court, or of doing any effective packing of the Court.

Nevertheless, there will be terrific efforts to raise and inflame a posse after the horse has been returned to the stable and the door has been banged, barred, and bolted. The reason is simple. The Republicans are in desperate need of an intellectually respectable issue which also carries an emotional appeal. They might win in 1936 if they did no more than to mumble the baldest of platitudes while relying on the protest vote. The mounting volume of opposition to Mr. Roosevelt in the East has no affirmative objective. It is against Mr. Roosevelt. Likely as not it will grow; likely as not it will spread info the Middle West and perhaps beyond. Quite possibly that will be enough to elect any respectable thirdrater whom the Republicans may nominate. But politicians without a ‘cause’ always feel like a man who has gone outdoors without his trousers. The weather may be balmy and the trousers may not actually be needed, but the man feels ridiculous without them. The protest vote may be sufficient and the ‘ cause ’ may not actually be needed, but the politicians feel ridiculous without it. Moreover, instinct confirms custom. There is always the fear that without a ‘ cause’ to unite and point the protest vote, it may straggle and lose its onrushing force. Hence the passionate desire of the Republican strategists to rescue and restore the dear old Constitution months after the Supreme Court rescued and restored it before the eyes of all men. Blame them not, for other ‘cause’ have they none.

III

It really is astonishing to review the scene and to take account of the extent to which the Republicans compromised themselves in the issues on which Mr. Roosevelt has faced and is facing the heaviest barrage of intelligent criticism — the issues, indeed, as to which he has been most in the wrong. Take the AAA. It is the antithesis of the old American idea. It repudiates industry and promotes indolence by paying men not to produce. It adds to this revolution in American values the hitherto hateful principle of coercion, however suavely or indirectly coercion may be applied. The American farmer, for a century and a half as independent a human being as ever trod this earth, becomes a tiny cog in an unimaginably vast machine whose throttle is in Washington. Meantime, the multitudes in the cities and towns of the country are being taxed savagely in their foodstuffs to provide money wherewith to bribe the farmer not to produce foodstuffs freely.

And face to face with this Rooseveltian fantasy of economics, what is the action of the Republican chieftains who have undertaken to save us from Roosevelt? Meeting in Washington in the early autumn, they decided that they would not include the AAA in the bill of particulars which they lodged against Mr. Roosevelt and his administration. Guffawing correspondents asked why. They were told that the reason was obvious and, in truth, it was. The Republican leaders are paralyzed in the presence of the issue created by the AAA.

The only essential difference between the Roosevelt fantasy of economics that is the AAA and the Republican agricultural policies that began with Mr. Hoover’s administration is that the Roosevelt scheme does put money into the farmers’ pockets. The money is taken from the sweating masses in the cities, and in the long run the scheme will react against the farmers. But the Hoover scheme also was to take money from the sweating masses in the cities, and it required not even the long run to react against the farmers. It reacted without a decent delay.

The brutal truth is that both Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Hoover have tried to soothe the farmer with schemes to rig markets. Both Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Hoover avoided a headon collision with the problem of agriculture.

What the farmer needs is to get markets open. Mr. Roosevelt has not tried to achieve that, in any serious way, although his 1932 campaign placed that duty upon him. Mr. Hoover’s part was worse. He was in the Harding and Coolidge administrations which did all in their power to close markets for the farmers by raising tariff barriers so high against manufactured articles that other nations could sell relatively little to us, and therefore could buy relatively little except while we were lending them money with which to pay for our goods. This strangulation of natural trade, added to the passion for agricultural self-sufficiency at any cost which gathered force among the nations during the war and continued in the stress of the post-war period, threw the American farmer upon his haunches. For a time he was beguiled by additional tariff ‘protection’ for his own products, but in due course he became aware of the shabby fraud of ‘protection’ for commodities in which there is an exportable surplus. Therefore the cry for the McNaryHaugen Bill, to which volume was added by the voices of Frank O. Lowden and Charles G. Dawes. Mr. Hoover’s response in his own administration was, on the one hand, the Smoot-Hawley tariff law which added to the farmer’s woes by further closing markets, and, on the other, an attempt to raise agricultural prices arbitrarily and artificially against the American consumer by taking agricultural commodities off the market (without any idea of what was later to be done with them) and by operating in commodity markets.

To-day, the Republicans are hooked. They can go into New England and raise a tempest over the processing taxes which are used to pay off the farmer for not working so hard and not producing so much, but they dare not go out into the West and tell the farmer that, if given power, they are going to wipe out the whole business. For one thing, they are chiefly responsible for the farmer’s belief that there must be some way to provide him with a bounty, direct or indirect or both, which will be equivalent to the bounty given the manufacturer indirectly in the system of unprecedented tariff protection which has been the law since Mr. Harding led the nation back to normalcy. As late as the time of the ‘grass roots’ convention in Springfield, Illinois, former Governor Lowden was warning his party comrades that, while protectionism prevails for manufactures, some equivalent of bounty must be provided for agriculture. For another thing, the Republicans are unable to go to the farmers and say that they will reduce the manufacturers’ tariff as a compensation to agriculture for the stoppage of its bounties. The farmers would not believe any Republicans who told them that. And while the manufacturers probably would not believe it either, they might act as though they believed it when campaign collectors came around.

There is nothing for the Republicans, facing the issue of AAA, to do. They must squirm and hedge. And they will be fortunate if the Supreme Court is merciful in its treatment of the AAA system. If that, too, is invalidated, the farmers are likely to back both parties against the wall and ask, ‘What now?’ Hedging, already difficult and ludicrous, may become impossible for the brethren of the G.O.P.

If the Supreme Court had not invalidated the NRA, the Republicans would have been little less embarrassed in taking advantage of the practical breakdown of that system which preceded the court’s action. In the effort at ‘planned economy’ by planners who could not see three inches beyond their noses, Mr. Roosevelt undertook a system of controls over business that was as violently in conflict with the traditional American idea as his agricultural schemes. He caused Congress to attempt to obliterate the lines of the states and to arrogate to the Federal Government complete power over industry and trade — power, too, that was not the sum of previous state power plus Federal power, but that far exceeded the total of all power previously exercised by government in this country. And, having had Congress attempt to arrogate this unprecedented power to the Federal Government, Mr. Roosevelt had Congress attempt to lodge the whole of it in his hands. Very well! Consider that arrogation of power — consider it as set forth in the opinion of the Chief Justice — and then see how many Republican leaders you can identify with the opposition to the NRA at the height of Mr. Roosevelt’s popularity!

Go a little farther. Look into the ranks of the great industrialists who write the ticket on which the Republican leaders travel and see how many of those powerful men-behindthe-scenes were absent from Mr. Roosevelt’s cheer section when the NRA spread over the land in 1933. The prospect of escape from the antitrust laws, which they discerned in the NRA, brought those gentlemen into the open. Under the inspiring leadership of Mr. Henry I. Harriman, then president of the United States Chamber of Commerce, they were the most vocal band of idealists with whom the nation has been blessed since the emotional days of the Great War.

And think back, if you are interested in the Republican conduct in that period, to the outrageous effort of Mr. Roosevelt’s administration to bludgeon Henry Ford into clicking his heels before the image of the Blue Eagle. Think back to the administration’s attempt to set up a boycott against Ford and to the administration’s simultaneous admission that it had no evidence that he had violated the automobile code, and try to count three eminent Republicans who boldly and persistently challenged Mr. Roosevelt on this act of oppression.

IV

The record runs on. There is the Roosevelt gold policy, which the President does not usually mention these days except in the West. When the entering wedges of that policy appeared in the late spring of 1933, it was a Democrat, Carter Glass, who roared forth the orthodox doctrines to which both parties had been pledged in the campaign of the previous year. And, as against the echoes of Glass’s fury which came from the Republican David A. Reed, there was the melancholy headshaking of William E. Borah, whose fear was that the Thomas amendment would not ensure inflation. He is the same Borah who was but lately the choice for the Presidential nomination in 1936 in a poll of Republican workers, and who, opposed by others because of his age or other reason, remains the general type of Westerner toward whom the hearts of good party men yearn in this hour when, we are told, national salvation summons the Grand Old Party to the post of duty. And if you look behind the political façade to discover what was being done in those days by the men of affairs whose advice is given respectful attention in Republican councils, you will find that the prevailing mood was one of sweet reasonableness toward Mr. Roosevelt’s monetary experiments. ‘Something had to be done.’ Moreover, evil though inflation be, there was the possibility that temporarily it would restore vitality to various cats and dogs that were lying around in bank vaults and in the more spacious private boxes.

All in all it was a poor day’s work. The Republicans had ‘gone bust’ as doers in the Harding-Coolidge-Hoover New Economic Era and they capped the record by going bust as critics in the days when Mr. Roosevelt rolled up his sleeves and began to make over America. They are not even in a position to enter a close-quarters debate on the budget with any comfort or assurance. For not only must the Republicans reckon with Mr. Hoover’s great deficits — as to which it may be said that they were the result of bleeding to death, while Mr. Roosevelt’s deficits at least provided a high old time; the Republicans must also face up to the financial consequences of their own New Dealism. They will not say that they intend to cut off the farmer’s bounty. They will not say that they intend to cut off relief. They will not say that they intend to cut off the Federal Government’s contributions to social services. And, of course, they will not say they intend to cut off veterans’ benefits or outlays for new military and naval undertakings. They will not say in any tangible terms that they intend to cut down these expenditures. They are appalled by Mr. Roosevelt’s spending, — and some of them are quite sincere, — but they are miserably entangled by their past performances and their present exigencies. They will be mighty men in abstractions and generalizations, but they will be cautious men when toe to toe with combative Democrats armed with statistics. If, as seems probable, their ultimate farm policy calls for bounties and yet for removal of processing taxes, they may create a new budgetary problem before which they will be utterly helpless.

Unless the Republicans are to depend upon dumb luck and the protest vote, they must go to the country with something better than criticism of Roosevelt policies on which their own record has been (and to an extraordinary degree continues to be) pitiably befuddled and baffled. They need, if their campaign is to have any of the positive quality which may be imperative in a fight against an adroit and audacious foeman, an issue that will be so inclusive as to sweep over and to hide the ghastly wrinkles in their record and the gaping holes in their programme — an issue that will carry pervasive and potent symbolism and will stir emotion. The Constitution is their bet, and their shrewder strategists recognize it as such and have been drumming it into the popular imagination with untiring reiteration.

Logically, of course, they are in no better position with the Constitution as an issue than with any of Mr. Roosevelt’s drastic policies to which they presented a muddled or acquiescent front. People who quit when the NRA fight was on, or actually supported that revolutionary project, are not in respectable position to appear as saviors of the Constitution. People who now give their assent to AAA, whether it be constitutional or unconstitutional, are scarcely eligible to lead crusades. But it is not logic to which the Republican strategists plan to appeal. Their appeal is to the emotions of men who have wandered after strange gods and are weary. In that mood, men are not overly critical of the priests who hold up to their eyes the sacred writings.

The Republicans have better than a chance. Lately, a retired clergyman, scholarly and a lifelong liberal Democrat in a Republican community, made a visit to his old home in Maine. He talked with friends of boyhood and early manhood, and among the stories they told him was one of a widow doing her best on a farm. She had butchered two hogs for the use of her family. Some time later, Federal employees heard of her action and called on her. She told them that she had raised the two hogs and had butchered them and was using the meat in her home. They laid upon her penalties of eighteen dollars, which she paid out of her scant store. ‘I would not,’ said the minister in his quiet and gentle voice, ‘have supposed that such things could happen in our country.’

This clergyman had felt that the emergency of 1932 and 1933 warranted, and indeed commanded, bold action, and he had weighed Mr. Roosevelt’s devices in a calm mind, trained to liberal inquiry. There had been doubts and the doubts had grown. But still he held a judicial calm and sought to balance good against error. And then one day these logical processes were exploded by a charge of emotion. The image in his mind of a free people had been brutally demolished and the image of a people under overseers had been erected. Perhaps the Federal agents who gouged eighteen dollars out of the widow’s poverty did not know the laws and were unwittingly abusing them as well as the widow. Perhaps it was all a mistake. But the widow did not know the law; she could not. And the widow could not afford to hire lawyers and investigate and test the complex provisions of the agricultural acts, fashioned by a centralized government for the control of a continent. When the long arm of Washington reached out, there was nothing for her to do but submit and yield of her pittance. And at last account the clergyman, lifelong liberal Democrat, was prepared to vote for a Republican in 1936, even, as he said, for Senator Dickinson. He wanted to go back to the old body of ideas. He wanted to restore the old fundamentals. He wanted the old sense of liberty and of individual rights. He was back in the belief that a benevolent despotism is an abstraction of the mind, and never a reality of government. And, as every observant person must know, this clergyman is a type whose number has increased enormously within the last six months.

V

In 1933, ‘planned economy’ were words with which to conjure. To-day, they are almost as bedraggled as ‘ technocracy.’ Mr. Roosevelt still has popularity, and, in some sections, great popularity. But it is the popularity of a man who remains in many hearts as a gallant leader who dared and risked for the sake of his suffering countrymen, and who champions the underdog. His no longer is the popularity of the great lawgiver. Read the popular defenses of his administration as they appear in letters in the newspapers. This defense can be compressed into a single sentence: ‘Grant that he made a mistake here and a mistake there, and that many of his ideas have not worked out, are you not better off than under Hoover?’ For that matter, the same defense is made in substance by the accredited spokesmen of the administration and of the Democratic Party. For they face a people plainly disillusioned as to ‘the peaceful revolution.’

Two years ago suffering had so ravaged the people that they were impatient of anything short of miracles. ‘Planned economy,’ in the sense of controlled economy, responded to the agonized mood. Government and business and labor were to coöperate in Washington so to regulate industry and trade that production would be balanced nicely to consumption, and jobs would be evenly divided. Where were we to find the geniuses who would build and operate this gigantic machine ?

The question went unnoticed. The people had suffered too greatly to be denied the dream. Were the geniuses to be the same industrial and financial geniuses who had ruled the nation in the Harding-Coolidge-Hoover regime? If so, why would they be wiser in swivel chairs in Washington than they had been in swivel chairs in New York? Or were the geniuses who would rule in Washington to be originals, and, if so, who ?

No answer to these questions. And was there danger that the genius would not appear at all, and that the petty functionary would descend upon the land in swarms, to harass the people and consume their substance, after the manner of authoritarian governments from time immemorial? Still no answer. Was there not danger that the pursuit of absolute security through a controlled economy, rigorously governing industry, agriculture, and finance, would prove a mirage, while the hardwon rights of the individual would be invaded and largely destroyed? Still no answer.

The people asked for miracles and would not be denied. But to-day they are aware that Professor Moley started out to be receiver for a bankrupt world and ended as receiver for a bankrupt hotel; they have seen coöperative, ’lend-their-services’ magnates descend upon Washington in front-page headlines and depart in footnotes, and they also have a fairly good idea as to the number of their neighbors who are on the government’s pay roll, and how they got there and what they do. The result is pronounced nostalgia for the governmental home in which we made shift for a matter of a century and a half.

The mood is deepened by the low moral estate to which dictators have fallen in the last year or so. They have embarrassed some of our thinkers, and alarmed others. For a good many years the sort of people who are now faithful readers of the bulletins of the Liberty League were accustomed, over coffee and liqueur, to exchange profound thoughts on the merits of dictatorship. It probably was too much to expect in these United States, but it was pleasant to dream. And as the depression gathered weight beyond all calculation, some of these dreamers began to dream in daylight, and the idea took a vague kind of hold among a good many of the middle class and was not always a cause of rage among the workers. At least we could have a powerful, regulatory government in Washington. There was Russia, with a powerful authoritarian government of the Left; and there were Germany and Italy with powerful authoritarian governments of the Right. We were out of style and old-fashioned and therefore probably stupid. Could we not have something of this sort — American brand, of course? And, indeed, Mr. Roosevelt with his high-handed methods and his gayly democratic manners served very well for a time. But, as it happened, almost at the same time that the people began to realize that professors were falling down while the functionaries who collect eighteen dollars from widows were climbing up, things began to happen abroad. Stalin killed off a number of dissenters in very unpleasant fashion. Hitler’s brutalities became even more grotesque, while word spread that his finances were in a deplorable state. And not long after, Mussolini, darling for a decade of our ’upper classes,’ followed up reports that he, too, was on the verge of bankruptcy by embarking upon the high adventure of shooting Ethiopians sitting. The result is that in almost any casual conversation one hears the word ‘liberty’ mentioned, often with respect.

All in all, the play of our Republican friends is good. Barring some upheaval in world affairs which may extend its influences directly and sharply into our politics, the revived interest of the people in the rights of the individual, as against an overlording busybody of a government in Washington, seems likely to wax and to spread. The Republicans should be able to do a good deal in converting that sentiment into a Save the Constitution Movement. It will be a movement to rescue the rescued. The old horse is safe in the stable and comfortably munching hay under the affectionate eye of Hostler Hughes. No matter, say the strategists; let’s all go out and organize the biggest band of vigilantes anybody ever has seen.