Site Ed. Note: And you thought Candid Camera came around in the fifties and the paparazzi were invented by "La Dolce Vita".

And that descrying between Red and Blue was inaugurated by the cable news channels in the mid-nineties.

"Raffles", incidentally, refers to the "amateur cracksman" of cinematic serial fiction in the teens through thirties, a debonair thief who used primarily not stealth but eclat to prey on the family jewels.

We must also say re "A War for Peace" that the young Mr. Howard Lee's notions were salutary enough and might have actually prevented the much larger war which followed had the advice been taken by the allies at the time in the spring of 1938; Cash basically agreed but his objection lay in the idea that couching policies which inexorably lead to war in expressions of peace was both oxymoronic and disingenuous, that if lives are to be risked and lost inevitably, then we must be honest about it before undertaking so great a potential tragedy, insuring sacrificial morbidity for years to come, so that a rational and full debate might take place aforehand, not as young lives are perishing on the killing field. Expressed in other terms: leadership, not salesmanship.

The way Cash expresses his criticism suggests he might also have quite an equal or greater objection to the equally dissembling, disingenuous and oxymoronic statement we recently heard from someone to the effect that the Iraq war is "a war for peace". This, we must stop and consider, is exactly and precisely the sort of rhetoric used by Hitler: all he wanted was peace, for which he was quite willing to wage offensive war to obtain.

So what is the difference between offensive war and preemptive war? Probably the same difference as exists between offensive nuclear missiles and defensive nuclear missiles.

To all of that bunk from the bunkers, we say: give peace a chance, and not through war. As for our experience since we were just a little tyke, it seems, cold or hot or just lukewarm, we feel quite as though, as the singer-songwriter's new song says, that, save for a few daring years during the mid-nineties, we've been living with war everyday.

Since everyone loves a good thriller, and we have collectively apparently become so accustomed to this everyday war's thrilling titillation in the nighttime to keep us cozy by the fire, insulated from the feeling of insecurity with the knowledge that war is in procession, the real question appears to be whether we can live without that tension for very long without becoming so restless as to need the satiation of war to becalm our otherwise frayed nerves occasioned by the deafening silence of peace. Do we need every now and then to hear about a lot of bloodshed somewhere in the world to feel alive and appreciative of being so ourselves? Can we not tolerate too long any slice of Heaven's semblance without assuring shortly that Hell's slicing sickles still quite exist?

Chief Frank Littlejohn caught our Candid Cameraman yesterday, and we're glad of it. True, it took practically the whole force of detectives to do the job, some preparation in advance, and what is known in the profession as "tailing," which we would call shadowing. The Candid Cameraman, too, had taken elaborate and unusual precautions against being caught in the act, but caught he was, as the film from his own camera will show.

And still we're glad of it, for while the Candid Camera performances have been good fun and have called for considerable ingenuity and deception on our operative's part, it's assuring to know that the detective force, in their one engagement, outwitted him. For the Cameraman was a sort of a photographic Raffles, who stole pictures and served notice in advance when and where he was going to steal them. We shall go to bed more comfortably tonight knowing that the Detective Division won't let a marauder like that prowl around the community, and that candid cameraing doesn't pay.

In the war games out on the Pacific Coast, a Purple Fleet of the United States Navy is "attacking" and a Green Fleet is "defending." And those names are not without their little humors. The standard name which used to be applied to the "attacking" force was the Red Fleet, and the "defending" force the Blue Fleet.

So far as Blue goes, we can think of no reason why it should not continue to be used. Aren't we all? But that word, Red, you comprehend, has acquired vividly significant connotations in the last twenty years. Its use in the connection might possibly look a little personal to a powerful nation. Soon or late, it almost certainly would bring Ham Fish up in the Congress to demand an investigation to see if it were not covert Communist propaganda. And beyond any doubt at all, it would serve as the stuff out of which low Republicans would make jokes at the expense of the gentleman now dwelling in the White House.

Discretion, you see, is one of the things they teach young men at Annapolis.

Frank Hancock, aspirant to the Senatorial toga now so gloriously filled by Robert Rice Reynolds, has been discovered to be ineligible to membership in the American Legion. He served for a short time in officers' training camp in 1917, but was honorably discharged for personal reasons. On the basis of that discharge he was accepted by the Oxford post, but it develops now that he was not really eligible because of the length of his service.

What is very interesting about the case is that the man who set the Legion authorities to inquiring into it was the Federal Marshal for the Middle District, and an ardent henchman of Robert Rice Reynolds, who got him his job. The zealous Marshal, it appears, thought that Mr. Hancock's war record ought to be made perfectly clear, particularly as there was a campaign on.

All of which reminds us suddenly to fall a-wondering what the war record of Robert Rice Reynolds may be. We know that he has done heroic deeds in the Senate for the Legion. But what heroic deeds did he do when the guns were rolling on the Western front in 1917-18? Surely he must have led a forlorn charge at the least? For is it not of record that he was then in the flower of his early manhood? that he was in the time a distinctly military character--that along in 1916 he used to command an Asheville cavalry company of the National Guard and rode about town on a dashing charger? But, alas, if Robert led any charges or even served in the war at all we can't discover it. We can only discover that he resigned his command in the Guard somewhere not very far from the time when the United States went to war with Germany.

What FDR, as the headline-writers have to call him, and Henry Ford talked about yesterday, nobody will say. To supply the deficiency we present herewith a sample of what they could have said to each other.

FDR: Mr. Ford, I have heard that when you bring out a new model, your accountants tell you what each unit will cost and you then fix the selling price below that figure.

HF: That's right, Mr. President. We count on the volume of sales to bring manufacturing costs down and enable us to make a profit.

FDR: And a very good idea it is, Mr. Ford; something like what I'm working out with the cost of government.

HF: The cost of government?

FDR: Quite so. You see, the cost of government right now exceeds its revenue, but we figure that we'll get it back in greater tax receipts from the prosperity we bring about. That's something like what you do in your automobile business, isn't it?

HF: Well, something like, I guess, but it seems to me, Mr. President, you've left one very important point out of consideration.

FDR: And what is that, Mr. Ford?

HF: Why, before we count on any great volume of sales with a new model, we always make sure that the durned thing will run.

FDR: I don't get you, Mr. Ford.

HF: I didn't think you would, Mr. President.

Young Mr. Howard Lee, Southern Secretary of the American Student Union, delivered a speech in Greensboro Monday night on the eve of the nation-wide "student strike against war."

Was this, then, another speech urging young men to take up the "Oxford pledge" and make it perfectly plain that they won't fight under any circumstances? Not at all. That, said Mr. Lee, was definitely out, and so was isolation. And he went on to the real point of his argument--to wit, that the fascist powers must be stopped in Spain and China. It could be done, he said, simply by revoking the application of the Neutrality law to Spain, allowing the Loyalists to buy arms in our markets as they have a legal right to do under international law, and making an agreement with Britain and France to use our full economic power to impede the fascists.

He may be right. But it is not at all certain. And in any case whatever, it is somewhat less than candid for Mr. Lee to call his speech "The Road to Peace." Actually, it was simply an appeal for us to come to the aid of Spanish Loyalists and, incidentally, of China. If economic pressure worked, if the Spanish Loyalists, given arms, overmatched Franco, it might possibly, indeed, make for a kind of peace. But the sober fact is that it would probably lead promptly to war. Perhaps it shall have to come to that yet. Perhaps we shall have to have war in order to stop the fascists. But to propose to get us into war under the slogan that it is all for peace, smacks most reminiscently of the stuff which had the last war to be a war to end wars.

One of the prime arguments against the New Deal is that it has got capital in such a state that it is afraid to venture forth and go to work. This probably doesn't mean a lot to most of us, who can't scrape up a great deal of sympathy for those people who have so much money they don't know what to do with it. All the same, this stalemate between reform and recovery has a direct and exceedingly deleterious bearing on our own small concerns.

And that it is a stalemate of some kind, the naked figures will show. Registrations of securities with SEC in the first quarter of this year were $355,819,000--a considerable sum, taken by itself; but look at it in relation to the past. In the same quarter last year, registrations came to $1,297,115,000. But 1937 itself was a picayunish year in comparison with 1927, say. In that whole year issues of corporate securities amounted to $7,319,200,000. And 1927 was a piker alongside of 1929 with its ten billions of securities issued, exclusive of government securities.

These dull figures, looked at in the light of the theory that the only impetus from which the country as a whole surges ahead is the impetus of capital investment, take on a certain drab life, though they remain altogether discouraging.