The Charlotte News

Friday, June 2, 1939

FIVE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: ...'s Night... But they were very clean.

What we should like to know is whether at Mr. Goofiebaum's one might come by some really bad eggs.

Not All The Wild Schemes Come From The Utopian Pioneers

The Townsend Plan got thoroughly voted down yesterday, but there is more than one "shortcut to Utopia" and not by any means all of them originate in the "lunatic fringe." Bordering closely on lunacy is the proposal to have the RFC insure bank loans to small businesses.

There are several generalities almost of axiomatic quality, which testify to the unwisdom of such a procedure. For one, the mortality rate among small businesses is high--exceedingly high. For another, bankers, their coffers running over, are out with lanterns looking for safe loans--and the Government can afford to insure no other kind. For a third, the Government is known for a sucker and played as such. When it offers to help someone, he usually proceeds forthwith to help himself, generously.

There may be something to the argument that our credit system is insufficient and that it does not take care of the capital needs of small businesses. Commercial banks cannot make such long-term loans, and investment banks won't bother with small fry. But if the need is there, so is the credit supply and private initiative.

Some Eminent Lawyers Find Themselves Without Evidence

The Messrs. W. A. Cole, J. J. Fitzpatrick, Parker McCollester et al., must have sweated copiously before the ICC yesterday. All of them are lawyers of considerable eminence. And good lawyers are generally logicians, and so like best to argue from evidence. It may not be very good nor very overwhelming evidence. A single fact or figure, even though a little dubious, will serve quite as well as a whole encyclopedia or statistical abstract, for their powers of expansion run to the infinite.

But yesterday when they appeared before the ICC in behalf of the Northern railroads which are fighting the South's efforts to secure fairer freight rates, they were without any evidence of any sort. All they could do was to talk at great length, making one large statement after another in the forlorn hope of turning the gentlemen of the ICC a little dizzy. One such large statement consisted of the allegation that the report of Commissioner Lee, which recommends a general revision of the rates in favor of Dixie, itself has no adequate evidence in it. If they were really serious about that, it would be interesting to know what they mean by adequate. For the report is full of stuff like this: that it costs $1.91 cents to transport 100 pounds of freight the 801 miles from Charlotte to St. Louis, but only $1.42 to transport 100 pounds the 803 miles from New York to St. Louis; or that, though Maxton, N.C. is the same distance from Vicksburg, Miss., that Charlotte is from St. Louis it costs $2.05 to transport 100 pounds from Maxton to Vicksburg, as against the $1.91 from Charlotte to St. Louis.

But of course they were not serious. They were only talking bravely away. And there is no hotter work for the logical mind than to be driven entirely into the realm of the sentimental, in which it does not by ordinary shine. Besides, it was a warm day yesterday. And so the learned and dignified gentlemen must have sweated painfully, even while remembering the nice fat fee with which the Yankee roads were going to reward them for their valiant endeavors.

There Might Have Been Demons In That Stuff, You Know

Paranoia slithered plainly out into the open in the comic opera scene over the Dies Committee's water jug yesterday. The "aide" of George Van Horne Moseley was very much insistent that somebody must vouch for that water jug, and the old General himself would not drink from it. The Reds and the Jews in Congress might have poisoned it, you see, with a view to disposing of the great man for good. More probably still, there were Red and Jew demons lurking in it, for the dire purpose of turning him into a fried egg or head of cabbage.

Such delusions are the invariable stigmata of paranoia--in psychiatric clinics go under the name of "persecution complexes." And they are generally associated with notions of vast "plots" by terrible agencies, such as the General described at great length in his statement--plots which are commonly "proved" with elaborateness, just as the General "proved" his, by endless quotations of what Mr. Smith heard from Mr. Jones who got it from Mr. Brown who got it from Mr. White who got it from the waiter in Mr. Goofiebaum's restaurant who got it from the barber next door who had it from the housemaid, and so on forever. And not only this, but also with what is called the "savior complex." The General is going to save us from ourselves, you know.

Dorothy Thompson was suggesting the other day that the way to get rid of alien hate-peddlers like Fritz Kuhn is to look up their criminal records. In the case of the domestic species, however, it seems only necessary to call in an examining board for the booby-hatch.

And Meet The Competition Of These Easy-Money Times

There is something about the new loan policy of the Mutual and the Mechanics Building & Loan Associations which is stimulating, at least to the old residents among us. For years--oh, for more years than most of us have seen--these two home-building agencies have had but one lending plan, and it was iron-bound. You got your loan and you took out so many shares which were calculated to pay it off in something over six years. Maybe there was a second mortgage somewhere, but you could arrange about that after you had finished with the first mortgage.

A lot of homes were purchased on the B&L's commitments, too, and a lot of mortgages were paid off in what seems now, by comparison with terms of the mode, almost rapid-fire order. Indeed, the home-owning distinction of this town traces in large part to its two active and helpful "Billy Malones," a term that the late E. L. Keesler used to employ in his brisk advertisements.

But with new days came new ways. People began to want homes who could meet building & loan requirements neither as to size of down payment or installments. A while back, if we mistake not, they did extend the term from six years to eleven or some such period, but that was a concession only in degree.

And so now they have adopted jointly the "direct reduction home loan plan." They'll lend you up to 75 per cent, instead of about 60. You can have almost as long a time to pay back as you wish, with the privilege of retiring all or any additional part of the loan anytime. And it pleases us to think, both because of The News' long acquaintance with these institutions and their complete local identity, that they have accepted the challenge of the times and met it.

Two In Which The Nazis Reveal Several Things

Two quaint little stories came out of Germany Wednesday. One of them had Colonel-General-Field-Marshall Goering, as well as the chief stooge newspapers of Adolf Hitler's pocket-realm, proudly boasting the exploits of 6,000 Germans who are being brought home from Spain. Among other things, it was explicitly said that these Germans had been there from the beginning, mainly to man a great air force, and it was they who ferried over from Africa the Moors who saved Franco's cause from annihilation in the first four or five days of the war. That is going to be a little hard for a great many people to explain, including the ordinarily skeptical Henry L. Mencken of Baltimore--those people who have been telling us that it was only the Reds who were there in the beginning.

The other story had to do with Germany's indignation over England's "illegal methods" in establishing a "terrorist center" in Berlin.

A Labor member of Parliament had said in a speech before a Labor Party Congress at Southport, England, that "we are doing everything possible to feed propaganda to the legal publications in Germany so that the German people may be enlightened." That was the basis for the German suggestion that a protest to London is planned. Germany, as all the world knows, maintains just such "terrorist centers" in all the civilized lands of the world. So when she comes up in arms over England doing it in retaliation, what she says is that there is one rule for the Nazis, another for the rest of us. She seems to have no trouble in convincing herself as to the logic and justice of that. But she may encounter a little trouble in convincing the English.