Mr. Stettinius had not changed in his pronouncement one whit the British policy. But he had issued a firm challenge both to Britain and to Russia, one more generalized than just with reference to Italy, to respect the democratic processes of other nations.

Even if the road ahead were "long, steep and rocky", he had said where the country stood.

It opines that, in certain employment situations, the closed shop was preferable. But in other contexts, such as military camp construction where labor was short-term under war contracts, it had no place. A third observation was that union practices needed supervision in any type of closed shop environment. And, finally, that a state constitutional amendment was the wrong approach to the issue. Simple laws were the better remedy.

He had also been the lone Carolinian dissenter on the anti-strike bill, voting against it and its provisions to criminalize the attempts of anyone to foment a strike after the War Labor Board had issued an order. The President had vetoed that bill and only Mr. Morrison and one other Representative from the Carolinas had voted not to override.

Another bill on which he had stood alone was that fixing mustering-out pay for soldiers at up to $300. He was opposed to it, probably on the ground of favoring higher pay.

He had joined the majority, however, on passing the tax bill in February, that which had prompted a presidential veto and a scathing rebuke of the Congress, resulting in a furious reaction from Senate Majority Leader Alben Barkley. He had also joined the majority for overriding that veto.

Mr. Morrison had also been absent for ten of eleven roll calls of importance during the first half of the year.

The editorial throws up its hands in the end and expresses the opinion that the research into the record had proved little of consistency.

The grievances of the prisoners had been regarding medical care, freedom of religion, equality of pay, and the right of white prisoners to be segregated from black prisoners and Nazis. One group incarcerated for robbery had taken special offense at a Nazi having made the comment that all thieves should be put to death.

The piece offers that the strike was a sign of the times, much as labor was striking for some of the same things. Patients at the state mental hospital in Morganton might ask for some of the benefits which these prisoners sought.

Some of the grievances were reasonable and the piece expressed the hope that they would succeed in obtaining some of them.

But it was especially so with regard to putting the quietus on the Nazi banter. Civil rights, it insists, extend behind prison walls and there was a limit to what "patriotic American criminals" ought have to withstand.

Senator Bilbo appears to have taken a leaf from Antony expressing to the crowd the honor of Brutus after the unkindest cut to Caesar, in heaping ample praise upon Senator Vandenberg before essentially calling him to task as a stupid lout for proposing that a new study be done of the Tombigbee-Tennessee project, when several had already been conducted in past years.

He tells his daughter that he has questions regarding the appointment to State of four men of the backgrounds of Edward Stettinius, Joseph Grew, Nelson Rockefeller, and Will Clayton. The new Secretary had ties to J. P. Morgan. Mr. Rockefeller was grandson to John D. Mr. Clayton controlled two-thirds of the country's cotton. And Mr. Grew, as Undersecretary to Frank Kellogg during the Coolidge Administration in the latter twenties, had kowtowed to the British, played the "tail on the British kite", as Mr. Pearson forms the metaphor.

Such a coterie of men, he opined, would have to shift policy to take very tough stands against British imperialism beginning to creep into war policy, in contravention of the principles enunciated in August, 1941 in the Atlantic Charter. The signs of imperialistic tendencies were present in Greece, in Italy, in Belgium, where the British had tanks protecting the Belgian Parliament against protesters, and in Ethiopia where the British, after forcing out the Italians, continued occupation against the will of Haile Selassie and the people.

Mr. Stettinius, having cut his teeth on Lend-Lease to the British, concludes the columnist to his daughter, would be hard-pressed to effect drastic and hard-fisted change of this course.

Mr. MacLeish was a liberal New Dealer, Mr. Clayton, a conservative business man. But, contrary to the view of many liberals that the latter appointment constituted a bow unnecessarily to conservatism in light of the victory in the election for liberal causes, it expressed the notion that Mr. Clayton, representing conservative business interests, was willing to accord with Administration foreign policy and to work cohesively with the President, Mr. Stettinius, and Mr. MacLeish, et al.

So, concludes Mr. Grafton, the problem many editorialists and commentators were having in figuring out the problem of these appointments issued from the fact that there really was no problem in the first instance.

During the Tehran Conference a year earlier, Stalin would, at the close of each session of the daily conference at the Soviet Embassy--held there to avoid intra-city travel because of Soviet intercepts of threats from German agents, who had surreptitiously arrived in Tehran, to assassinate Roosevelt and Churchill--contact Moscow for hours regarding military strategy talks with his generals.

Thus, Roosevelt and Churchill, speculates Mr. Childs, might accede for this reason to Stalin's demand for a locale for the conference close to Moscow.

It was expected that the conference would be considerably longer than that at Tehran, lasting from November 28 through December 1. The reason, he posits, was because of the complexity of the decisions needed to be made regarding territorial disputes and the dangling strings from Dumbarton Oaks re the United Nations organization, compared to the relatively simple military strategy questions at Tehran re when and where the second front in the West would be opened in coordination with a push from the East by the Soviets.

The conference at Yalta in the Crimea would last from February 4 through 11, following a meeting with Chiang Kai-shek in Malta, January 30 through February 3. Stalin would continue to avoid any meeting with Chiang Kai-shek to maintain the face of neutrality with respect to Japan, as a year earlier when Roosevelt and Churchill met separately with the Chinese leader at Cairo.

So, on all counts, Mr. Childs was accurate in his predictions in this column.

The letter writer finds the extrapolation unfounded and expresses, in any event, the belief that the honorable service of veterans of the earlier war was deserving of the care by society of their widows and orphans and that the few who might become winter wives and young widows would be far outweighed by those truly deserving of the pension benefits.

The editors, with a note, stick by their prediction, however, that 2076 would see widows of World War I still receiving benefits.

Again, we defer, for 65 years, to someone else to inveigh against the widows' and orphans' benefits, if any, still being received in 2076 derived from veterans of World War I--even if our extrapolation pins the logically analogous checkpoint more nearly at 2050.