The Charlotte News

Tuesday, September 6, 1938

SIX EDITORIALS

We don't know whether "Cheap at the Price" was by Cash, but by the pig's sty in our eye it is certainly a nice comment on the price of meat at the market.

...What a wonderful world it would be...

One of the theories of the bus-car collision on the Wilkinson Boulevard Saturday night lays it to the road. Identical painted lines indicate the four lanes of the highway, and it is said that at night it is easy for a driver to become confused as to which lane he is in.

It's something of a coincidence that in a letter to the district State highway engineer by a resident of the city, written two months ago with a copy to The News, the specific suggestion was made that the center line on the Wilkinson Boulevard be painted a different color or otherwise distinguished, so that a driver might make sure he did not get off his own side of the road. It is still a good suggestion.

Apropos the high cost of legislation, President Roosevelt told Governor Harry Nice of Maryland a pointed story. It seems that a Government truck killed a woman's pig. Naturally, she wanted pay for it, but one doesn't march up to Uncle Sam and say, "Hey, pay me for my pig!" Her Congressman had to introduce a bill, it had to go to the committee on claims in both houses and be passed by both. In the end, the pig woman got her $7.50, "but," the President told Governor Nice, "it cost the Government $200 to pass the bill."

Shucks! That wa'n't nothin'. It probably cost the Government a thousand times $200, or $200,000 in legislative expense, for Congress to pass the lend-spend bill last session. But that was nothing compared to what it's going to cost the people in the end. Why, on one single day this week Mr. Morgenthau's department paid out five and a half times as much as it took in, and it took in ten million dollars.

'Deed, if Congress could just be kept busy paying for $7.50 pigs at an excess cost to the taxpayers of only $192.50, it would be the cheapest pork in American political history.

"Mr. A," a hypothetical, composite conservative whom the President employed yesterday as a stand-in for Senator Tydings, not only declined to co-operate in solving problems faced in 1933, "but found fault with or opposed, openly or secretly, almost every suggestion put forward, by those who belonged to the liberal school of thought."

The first problem faced in 1933 was the banks, all of which had been closed by Presidential proclamation. Senator Tydings, or "Mr. A," if the President prefers, voted for the Emergency Banking Act. Next came economy and Federal expenditures, in accordance with the 25 per cent saving promised in the Democratic platform. "Mr. A" voted for the National Economy Act. Next came beer, another Democratic promise. "Mr. A" voted for beer.

But the sweet unity was not to last, as foretold by "Mr. A's" nay on the Agricultural Adjustment Act in 1933. For this, "Mr. A" had his authority in the Democratic platform, which condemned the Hoover Farm Board's "unsound policy of restricting agricultural production to the demands of domestic markets." The President had his authority for AAA too, and the platform's covenant to bring about "the effective control of crop surpluses so that our farmers may have the full benefit of the domestic market."

And with the little reader's kind permission, we shall let "Mr. A's" vote on this measure, the first, of many negatives to come, stand as a symbol of the difference in his and the President's political philosophies. There is a marked difference all right, and it is fundamental. "Mr. A" believes in a minimum of government. "Mr. R" in a maximum. They worked together when they started out to put the Democratic platform into effect back there in 1933, but as the New Deal disclosed its true intentions, a gulf appear between them. That they both still remain nominally in the same party is a paradox to be cleared up only by determining whose party it is.

We derived a good deal of sardonic amusement from the headline in yesterday's News over the Labor Day story. It went like this.

LABOR LEADERS MOVE TO FIGHT FOR HIGHER LIVING STANDARDS

Call On Rank And File To Join Lists, Leaving Out Factional Disputes

Impressed, we read on, only to find as usual President Green of the AFL was expressing his desire for labor unity by giving John Lewis the very devil, and that Lewis was retorting in kind, doubled and re-doubled.

Samples of "leaving out factional disputes."

Green on the CIO: "... rebel group... radical opportunities... We have stood solidly against... Communism."

Lewis on the AFL: "... complacency and inertia... met efforts to organize the unorganized with sneers, reprisals, sabotage and vilification... civil war to destroy the labor movement... denounced labor laws and repudiated political friends of labor..."

If this is harmony, it is the first time on record that B-flat and C-sharp have been blended. Somebody must be doing some rapid transposition.

The European situation, which seems to grow tense and easy by turns, is described by the New York Times' London correspondent as "at least as serious as at any time during the last fortnight." This is his on-the-spot appraisal in spite of reports--

One would think that with these intimations of Germany's forbearance, London would be comforted rather than chilled with anxiety; but no. The English, remembering Austria, have become exceedingly cynical about Adolf's assurances. They fear that he may be deliberately scheming to beguile their watchfulness while he makes ready to pounce upon his prey. The English, in short, have been fooled once.

Many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased. --Daniel, xii. 4.

Today, as in years of progressively fonder recollection, a new school term begins. A step up it will represent for all those bright little girls and boys who made their grades, and a first and tremendously exciting step it will be for those tikes, astonishingly small to be beginning the quest for knowledge, who today go to school for the first time.

A considerable amount of personality is represented in these children, and adolescents. Their natures range, as in their elders, all the way from the complaisant to the rebellious, their aptitudes from a natural intelligence to unmistakable stupidity. A conglomeration of humanity equally as diverse, for all its juvenile character, as any adult society, the first test it is called on to meet is that of organization. These children must be organized into schools and rooms and rows of desks, observing all the while a certain discipline. After that, but only after that, instruction commences.

This instruction, too, is highly organized. It proceeds by uniform assignments in uniform texts throughout the whole school system. On such and such a day, whole roomfuls of children must be, along with other whole roomfuls, at such and such a point in their studies. This is vital, you see, because otherwise one room might finish ahead of other rooms, and then would be compelled to invent unassigned things to do until the others had caught up.

The whole point of our educational system is that the many varied rooms and the many varied children in those rooms shall come out on schedule. Individual or collective attitude has nothing to do with it, and can't, under the necessity of having to inculcate an equal instruction into the swift and the laggard impartially. But, somehow imperfect as it may be, this system seems to be the best that can be devised to cope with the enormous responsibility of educating all the children of all the people--at least to give them an equal chance at an education. Whether they get it or not, however, still depends most largely not on the State but on themselves. All the State can do is to organize them in readiness to receive it.