Among those delinquent in their tax accounts with the City Government are City employees. It is probably no worse for a man who works for the City to fall behind on his taxes than for anybody else, but by the same token, he deserves no preferential treatment. And that he is going to get none will appear in a few days when a list of such delinquents will be handed over to the City Treasurer with instructions to take the amounts due out of their pay envelopes.

We confess to a mean, sneaking little feeling of satisfaction that this is to happen, since these employees owe their livelihoods to the collection of taxes, but beyond that we believe the administration is to be commended for going after past due taxes of all kinds, whether in large amounts owed by landholders or in small amounts on personal property only. If such a policy had been in effect for the last five or ten years, there would have been fewer delinquents for the City to harass, and the amount of their individual arrearage would have been only a fifth or a tenth so large. It was no favor, we see at last, to let these indebtednesses accumulate.

Maybe "It can't happen here" in the country as a whole, but it is happening every other day or so in Haguetown. Into the tight little principality of the Vice-Chairman of the Democratic National Committee went Norman Thomas Saturday to make his speech. Out he went on his ear. Es ist verboten to make a speech in Jersey City without a permit from Mayor Hague, and The Hague is choosey about who makes speeches in Jersey City. Before the eminently respectable Mr. Thomas could get warmed up to his subjects, the cops were hustling him to the waterfront and planking him down on a ferryboat for New York.

It is a direct challenge to all the lovers of civil liberties in America, especially to that committee of Senators which has been making headlines with its investigations into capital-labor differences. These, with both sides guilty of using strong-arm methods, are often destructive of civil liberties, all right, but there is always the governmental authority and the courts to appeal to. In Jersey City the abrogation of civil liberties is a product of the governmental authority itself, aided and abetted by stooge courts, so that actually there is no recourse of appeal. And a Democratic Senate's ability to turn on the heat of public opinion is not to be exerted, apparently, against the Democratic Party official.

All but one of the beer and wine sellers of Mitchell County have surrendered their licenses and got out of the trade. There is no record that they agreed with Mr. Cale Burgess and company that they ought to get out. But Mr. Burgess had been very active in the Sunday Schools, and "committees waited on the seller and plainly told him that while he sold beer and wine they would not buy anything at his place." In short the dealers were boycotted into surrendering their legal rights.

Which reminds us of Virginia. Its last Legislature appropriated $1,000 to make a survey of all that has actually been found out about the effect of alcohol on the human body and mind--said survey to serve as a means for instructing the school boys and girls of the state, as required by law passed by the drys. Two reputable medical men were set at the task, and not long ago they turned in a 184-page report. But, horrors! They found that science had no evidence for the terrifying charge which the drys have for years peddled around as established truth. On the contrary, they found that the weight of medical opinion is to the effect that alcohol is not harmful unless used in excess. Wherefore--the drys immediately brought such pressure to bear that they not only succeeded in suppressing the report but also in having it destroyed by burning!

The boycott has been held illegal in many jurisdictions. And the common opinion of mankind long ago condemned it as unfair and indecent (try to imagine the dry indignation if wets boycotted dealers who refused to sell beer and wine!). And suppressing the truth is universally and justly set down as worse than forthright lying. But the drys are, by their own confession, God's own instruments, and so are not, we must suppose, to be judged by the standard which apply to common clay.

Adolf Hitler stood proudly in the Lustgarten yesterday and told his Germans that he alone had solved the problems with which other Western lands were still struggling--unemployment and the struggle between capital and labor. Granted, there is little unemployment in Germany, and no open dispute between capital and labor. But how has this been accomplished? Why, simply by turning Germany into a purely military establishment, with both capital and labor reduced to slavery to that establishment, and with both dedicated, not to the production of real wealth but primarily to the production of arms--and with the whole directed ultimately to ever increasing foreign accounts.

How much of a real "solution" is that? How long is it going to keep Germany prosperous? Isn't the fatal necessity of foreign expansion bound to land Germany in war soon or late? And when that comes--Germany may win as suddenly as she expects, certainly. No one can be sure. But the odds are at least equal that she will take a terrible beating. And what is most likely of all is that the war will drag out into a protracted stalemate, and that, "win or lose," in the end Germany will be more completely ruined than she has been since the close of the religious wars, when howling wolves alone populated half the German country.

Straight at the end of the road upon which Germany is embarked, in short, there very probably lies a time when there will be no unemployment and no capital to struggle over. And looking at that, we still prefer to go on "struggling" in an attempt to find a rational solution for our ills.

Further information on the tragic affair in McDowell County, when the Sheriff and a deputy opened a trap door in a filling station and thus discharged a shotgun attached to it, at grave injury to themselves, convinces The News that it was greatly mistaken when it declared that the officers were searching the premises without first having read a search warrant to the occupant of the premises. The fellow, an admitted bootlegger, was not, as we had read it, away at the time of the search, but was found at home by the officers, who read the warrant to him. Furthermore, he is said to have stood by without giving a warning while the officers lifted the trap door which fired the gun, and in the excitement following to have run away. He was caught later and carried off to Asheville because of the feeling that ran against him.

Which puts, of course, an entirely different face on the matter and calls for an apology. We make it immediately. The officers did take care to observe the strict requirements of the law as to making searches, and their injury was received wholly in line of duty.

Tucked away in a long list of resolutions by the North Carolina Federation of Women's Clubs was one urging the establishment of birth control clinics under the supervision of the State Board of Health. Time was when so frank a rejection of the stork legend would have brought down on the heads of these federated ladies not only the outrage of a great many respectable people, but perhaps a warning from the United States Government itself, which used to forbid the shipments of contraceptives and birth control literature across state lines.

But the world do move, and there is as little likelihood that these ladies will get into trouble as there is that birth control clinics will be established anywhere in the near future. For while we have accustomed ourselves to the respectability of birth control, we have not yet got around to the conviction that it is an essential public function or that there isn't something sinful about instruction in the practice of it. As a result, families on relief continue to bring forth crops of babies out of all proportion to their ability to rear them properly or even to feed and clothe them. But it will take time...