The Charlotte News

MONDAY, DECEMBER 20, 1937

EDITORIALS

The Rambunctious Rowboat


Our admiration for the Panay mounts steadily. She was not, according to the registry reports, exactly a fearful ship. She drew a picayunish 300 tons. She carried one three-inch gun forward, and none aft or elsewhere. She had no armor plate capable of stopping anything larger than a rifle bullet. And her crew consisted of some 25 men, including captain and galley boy.

Yet the Japanese say--and who is to dispute the statements of one of the principal governments of the world?--that she came steaming into the upper reaches of the Yangtze-kiang arrogantly and proudly. Came steaming up among dozens of Japanese ships, some of them big ones mounting 8-inch and 10-inch guns. Came chugging into the upper reaches of the Yangtze with dozens of Japanese ships before her and literally hundreds of them, including great ships of the line with 14-inch guns, strung out along the way to the sea behind her. Came steaming up with nothing but the cruiser Augusta and a few destroyers lying far back of her for support, with the American battle fleet away in Pearl Harbor and San Pedro. Came steaming up, and, without waiting for provocation, gaily opened her guns on the whole Japanese host.

We take off our hats to her. There, mates, was a ship.

The Flaw in Frank


Dr. Glenn Frank, head of the Republican Party's new policy formulating committee, is a vast improvement in a thousand respects over the Hoovers and John D. M. Hamiltons. The man has as good a background as almost any living American. He has integrity far above the politician's level. Moreover, and despite the attacks on him by the professionally liberal La Follettes, he is a sound liberal in the sense that he is perfectly aware that it is impossible to take the country back to 1929. He has many times indicated that he subscribes to the general principles enunciated by President Roosevelt as the credo of the New Deal, with reservations that the devices by which those principles have been applied have often been nonsensical, and that there was too little effort made to apply them within the framework of the Constitution.


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