The Charlotte News

Wednesday, July 6, 1938

SIX EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: We include also the following three snatches from the editorial page of this date:

(From The News of July 6, 1937)

NO SOAP

[There was not, we must admit, an editorial in last year's issue of this date worth reprinting. It may have been the heat or the fact that the Fourth had so recently gone by. Whatever, the cause...

There are bound to be dull days, of course, and we are resigned to that. But there is no excuse for going back a year to re-inflict dullness on the patient little reader. Once, in such cases, is enough. --Editors, The News.]

July 6, 1863

75 YEARS AGO

There has been four days' fighting near Gettysburg, commencing on Wednesday, July 1, and ending on Saturday night, July Fourth. It is reported here that A. P. Hill, Early and Rodes fought the enemy principally on Wednesday, beginning at 1 o'clock and lasting two hours. We drove the enemy through Gettysburg and two and a half miles beyond. At Gettysburg we captured their wounded--3,500 in number.

In the fight on Thursday our whole line is said to have been engaged, the line of battle extending six miles in length. The fighting continued until a very late hour of the night of Thursday and was renewed again on Friday and lasted all day and into Friday night. It is also reported to have begun again on Saturday and ended late Saturday night by our men capturing the immense fortifications of the enemy.

July 5, 1838

100 YEARS AGO

Intelligence from Mexico is received to the 17th ultimo. At that time the French frigate "Herminie" and three brigs were at the Sacrificios. The French Minister had left on the 17th; preparations were made to attack the place on the 8th, at which time the squadron consisted of two frigates and five brigs. A consultation was, however, held on that day and the enterprise abandoned. Great excitement was produced in the city by the rumor, so much that Governor Rincor advised the French residents to leave, as he might not be able to protect them in the event of an attack. The French enforce a rigid blockade; a number of English, French and American vessels had arrived in Sacrificios, and were refused admission.

Gargantua the Great, the big gorilla, has joined up with the Al G. Barnes Circus. And so has Frank Buck, the big Bring-Em-Back-Alive snake and tiger man. And so have the Wallendas, the high wire marvels. And Captain Terry Jacobs and Dolly and the lions, and William Reyer and his hosses, and the Naitos, Japanese acrobats and balancers. And, oh, yes--we nearly forgot: Roland Butler, the press agent.

The Barnes outfit is a subsidiary of the Ringling, Barnum & Bailey outfit. And in transferring these principal acts, including Roland's, to the subsidiary, the latter is of course only salvaging what it may from the wreck at Scranton. But it also means that we shall have our circus, with all the wonders, including Roland, spread out for our view. And for aging sentimentalists like ourselves, that looks like a boon to the public of aging sentimentalists like ourselves. And it looks like something of a boon to the circus performers, including Gargantua perhaps and Roland of a certainty.

Site Ed. Note: In this way, we say, Rolando, (or, as you like it, Oliver by any other gauntlet) would challenge the world...

The President plainly had his tongue in his cheek yesterday when he announced that he was going to continue to fight for the reorganization bill. Not that he didn't mean it, but that he said:

And that's a beautiful example of a speech promulgated by way of practical politics. As the President knows very well, that account of the matter is more than dubious. The boys, indeed, made a great to-do about all sorts of details. The Comptroller General was about to be abolished, the Civil Service Administrator would be the puppet of the President-Dictator, etc. etc.--all of which was pretty plainly not so. And some of them confessed frankly to a yen to smack the President down at any cost. But--the heart and core of that bill was simply a provision under which the President could have taken an army of 150,000 Government employees off the patronage list and put them under civil service.

Which, we betcha, was the main reason most of the boys were so dead set against the bill. For it is patronage, precisely, through which a Congressman keeps his job.

They have gone home from Gettysburg now, the 2,000 old men who are all that remain of the million and a half who once made up the greatest armies of their time. And the odds are that none of them will ever look with blearing eyes on the scene again.

What did they think about as they fumbled themselves into bed on the last night and watched the fireworks on Oak Hill in their honor? Not many of them had actually ever fought in the Wheat Field or the Peach Orchard, but all of them who were not past remembering could remember how those names at once hovered over the minds of the people, charged with hope and pride and despair and triumph. But, perhaps, in the way of the old, they did not think much of that. Perhaps they went looking about among the memories of childhood. Or thought of nothing save only that they were very tired old men who wanted very much to sleep. Or even did not think at all, as the brown leaf waiting for the Winter wind does not think.

But, whatever they thought, over them all hung that word forever. A long, long time they have lived as the [indiscernible words], but only a short gasping breath as compared with the long, long while that went before and the long, long while that shall come after. They had lived and fought and had their glory, and all very important it had seemed once. But now it was an old fading memory, and was about to end forever. It is a very long drawn and fateful word, that one, forever,--like the whistling of a ship passing down a fog-bound harbor to the sea.

Two or three weeks ago, Detective Chief Littlejohn, emphasizing the greater effect of certainty of punishment over severity of punishment, let fall a cynical comment about the management of Mecklenburg's Superior Court which, if there had been anyone to defend the court, would have caused an uproar. There was instead a dead silence. The chief said right out in meeting, so to speak:

In addition to cases of this kind, hundreds of others, involving people of no influence at all and without ten dollars to their name, have rotted on the court docket in this county. Not favoritism but simply inefficiency, archaic methods, inept administration and indifference have been responsible for the fact that these hundreds of criminals--store breakers, drunken drivers, assailants--have gone untried, first freed on bonds which weren't worth the paper they were written on, and finally forgotten in the rush of new court business. There has been no such thing as certainty of punishment in Mecklenburg County. Indeed, with more than 300 nolleprosses in the last fourteen months, there has been some unpredictable certainty of non-punishment, not through trial but through non-trial.

It was this condition to which Dr. V. K. Hart, retiring president of the Rotary Club, addressed himself yesterday. He recommended that the organization undertake a thorough study of court dockets and administration, to see what was wrong and what to do about it. We hope they take him up. The Rotarians preen themselves on service, and there is probably no greater service to be rendered in Mecklenburg County than this.

The National Labor Relations Board yesterday ordered the Harlan Fuel Co. of Yancey, in Harlan County, Ky., to cease its efforts to stop unionization of its employers by the United Mine Workers of America, John Lewis' CIO organization, and extended the order:

When you set up a town, you set up a town, whether you incorporate it or not; and the notion that you can treat its streets as private property is a relic of feudalism, when the barons owned their towns and the lives of those dwelling in it in fee simple. It gives you the power--as in this case--to deny the citizens those rights which under modern democracy we accept as inhering in them without regard to possession of property rights. And as such it is totally incompatible with common sense or any sound theory of private property rights. Indeed, it has done more than any other one thing to lend color to the propaganda that all private property is essentially feudalistic and anti-social. And its destruction ought to be welcomed and encouraged by everybody who generally wants to see private property rights preserved.

Anthony Eden has a high opinion of the United States' foreign policy. He said so in a speech at London on the Fourth. And France's Foreign Minister Georges Bonnet had the nicest things to say about American ideals and statesmanship in a speech he made in Paris on the Fourth. Our hearts swelled with pride.

But come to think of it, what is our foreign policy? The Good Neighbor? Of a certainty, in Pan-American affairs. But Pan-America is home, in a manner of speaking. Foreign is over yonder.

And over yonder we are doing the most contradictory things. On the theory that it is principally the hog-tying of international commerce which has set the world to yapping, Secretary Hull has been making trade treaties right and left, without any regard to political characteristics or animosities. Yet a trade treaty with Italy fell through because we wouldn't call the King of Italy Emperor of Ethiopia as well.

And we are shipping munitions and supplies of war to the combatants in China and Japan without a sign of official hindrance, yet to ship such materials to either side in Spain is against the law as the President has formally invoked. We have insisted to Japan's face that we have our rights in China and intend to preserve them, yet in Manchukuo, which used to be a part of China, the abrogation of all our rights raised no convincing protest whatsoever.

And that and more like that to the contrary notwithstanding, we agree with Messrs. Eden and Bonnet that our foreign policy is to be commended. We are doing, in the face of the gravest difficulties, the best we can, and nation nor man can do better than that.