Two Hands

If Robert Be Bright, Relief Ought To Go Around Now

It is axiomatic by now that no matter how much employment may increase, unemployment decreases very little. This is because persons on relief are largely marginal workers, unskilled and without much initiative, many of whom had never hired out even in the good old days except in a pinch.

And so it is not at all astonishing to find Congress with one hand passing gigantic armament bills which will put hundreds of thousands of men to work, and with the other passing a gigantic relief bill to take care of about as many unemployed as usual.

However, this year's relief bill contains one brand-new provision which, if Unser Bob Reynolds is any sort of prophet, is going to make a vast difference.

For years Robert has been quoting a statistic which he picked up somewhere to the effect that one out of every eight persons on relief was an alien. With 3,000,000 on W. P. A., this meant that 375,000 of them were aliens. With 2,000,000, 250,000 aliens. And this year's relief bill as passed by the House not only provides that aliens shall have no part of Federal relief but denies it to other assorted unlovelies, such as Communists and members of Nazi Bunds. These, again according to Robert's private statistics, are two numerous classes, so that in the aggregate the relief rolls ought to come down considerably without regard to industrial activity.

If, that is, Robert's figures turn out to be anywhere near right.

Master Race

It Is Good at Music, Mimicry and Murder

The people which is presently thrusting irresistibly through Northern France is, according to its leader, the natural Master Race of the earth, the only "culture-bearing" people. In view of that it is interesting to observe that it invented none of the weapons it uses with such terrible effect.

The airplane, which promises to be the death of Western civilization, was invented by two Americans, Orville and Wilbur Wright. An American named Gatling invented the machine-gun. The British developed a tank for use in the last war--from the model of the American tractor.

The submarine, which will be heard of again if Britain continues to resist after the fall of France, was invented by a Dutchman and developed by Englishmen and Americans.

Out of the United States also came the mass production method, which, when applied in war engines, is the secret of Hitler's power, and even the very machine tools which makes a Hitlerian sweep possible. We sold them to him, you know, because Business is Business.

As a matter of fact, the Master Race has contributed not a single one of the basic ideas on which civilization rests. The fathers of physics are not Germans; they are Newton, Faraday, Clerk Maxwell--all Englishmen. The fathers of chemistry are not Germans; they are Robert Boyle and John Dalton, the Englishmen, and Lavoiser, the Frenchman. The fathers of biology, geology, the associated sciences, are not German; they are Lamarck, the Frenchman; Darwin and Lyell, the Englishmen.

The very German philosophers take their basic ideas from the English and French philosophers, Bacon, Berkley, Hobbes, Locke, and Descartes, as the German political economist, Marx, took his from the fourteenth chapter of "The Wealth of Nations," by Adam Smith, a Scotchman.

The Master Race has a genius for music, for thoroughness in aping its betters and organizing slave labor, for war and destruction. Such promises to be the shape of the future of man.

Killing Cure

A Bill Which Adopts Nazi Principles To Get a Red

The bill to deport Harry Bridges, West Coast labor leader, reported out by the Immigration Committee of the House, is a cunning attempt to capitalize on the alarm in the country to accomplish an ulterior end.

There are few people left in the country who will deny that in the present case Bridges is dangerous. Whether he is a Communist or not, he is certainly taking the Communist line, and at his instigation his maritime unions are busily denouncing the Roosevelt arms program as a capitalist plot to betray the country into war.

He ought to be got rid of, and so ought the rest of the Communist agents in the unions. But by a law which shows some decent regard for the safety of the rights guaranteed under the Bill of Rights.

The present bill is in effect an effort to deal with the Trojan Horse danger in the country by plopping whole hog for Nazi methods. It violates every American tradition in singling out an individual and making a law against him for what is not, under existing law, a crime in itself.

Irish Base

Long War or Short, Adolph Needs It Greatly

The news reports keep on suggesting that Adolf Hitler wants Ireland as a base for invading England.

That is possible, particularly in case he fails to take the Channel ports; for it would afford him a good deal shorter sea passage than with the Dutch and Belgian ports.

However, the difficulties of such a move would be great. The western coast of England and Scotland is generally rugged, and there are only three ports of consequence--Bristol, Liverpool, and Glasgow.

What he probably really wants with the island is to make it into an air and submarine base.

Almost directly opposite Dublin lies the industrial heart of England--the smoking cities of Coventry, Manchester, Birmingham, the Five Towns, Leeds, Sheffield, and the coal mines and smelting plants of Wales. And from Belfast to Glasgow, as bombers fly, it is only about a hundred miles to Glasgow--where are building most of the new ships of the British Navy.

Yet again, bombers and submarines operating from Cork, Dublin, and Belfast would have an excellent chance of making the Irish Sea entirely too hot for ships and of wrecking the dock facilities of Liverpool and Glasgow. Yet more, operating from these bases and from Galway on the western coast of Ireland, the bombers and submarines would be able to sweep far out into the Atlantic and prey on shipping.

Indeed, operating from Galway, the submarines could take up post just outside of American territorial waters, just outside Canadian harbors, to wait for ships bound to England. The distance is only a little more than 2,000 miles.

All this would count tremendously in the lightning blow to beat England to her knees. And if that failed, it would still enable Hitler to hope to win a war of attrition. For, with his bombers from Belgium or the French ports and from Norway also closing the English ports on the eastern coast, it might be quite possible rapidly to starve England out.