With the experience of Saipan, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa during the previous year, it did not appear likely that General Geiger's prediction would prove accurate. But it did present at least an enticing picture of a faltering Japan, now ripe for the taking.

To make matters worse, Republican Representative Bertrand Gearhart of California poses the hypothetical whereby the Vice-President has become President and then suffers some disease necessitating that the Speaker of the House, third in line of succession under the proposed bill, would become Acting President and would thus resign as Speaker. Then if the Vice-President were to recover, what would become of the Speaker?

Mr. Lewis agrees that it posed a stumper because a new Speaker would have been elected in the predecessor's absence. He suggests that it would be up to the House at that time to broach the situation and remedy it or not.

Not done at complicating the obvious, Mr. Gearhart suggests further that if the Vice-President did not get along with the Speaker and wanted to get rid of him, he could feign illness and use it as a ploy to accomplish the hypothetical.

The response is not printed.

But, Mr. Gearhart, what if the country were to have an Actor as President? Then what? Is he the Acting President, the President acting, or the Real Thing?

One of the cited examples of Soviet antagonism to Yalta was the naming of former Socialist leader in Austria, Karl Renner, as the head of Austria's new government, without prior consultation with either the British or the Americans, as required by the Yalta agreement.

Mr. Pearson, however, reveals a note from the British Foreign Office, dated April 29, indicating that the British and the Americans had been consulted about Karl Renner, and the British had found him unobjectionable. Only the French had been left out of the process. The British had instructed Russia not to take any action, however, until the British had consulted with the Americans and French on the suitability of the provisional government. The Russians proceeded nevertheless to install the Renner Government, incensing American and British diplomats. The column reprints the note in full, indicating that Secretary of State Byrnes would have as his primary job at Potsdam ironing out these difficulties with the Soviets.

He next comments on the speculation that Chief Justice Harlan Stone might resign the Supreme Court, joining Justice Owen Roberts who had just resigned, commenting that they were the only Republicans remaining on the Court since the retirement in 1941 of Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes.

Both Stone and Roberts had been close in recent years and Court observers believed that the influence of Roberts had moved Chief Justice Stone, former medicine ball partner to President Hoover, to the right in his opinions, away from the influence of departed liberal Justices Louis Brandeis, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Benjamin Cardozo during the thirties.

Even though Justice William O. Douglas had been the Chief Justice's student at Columbia Law School, the Chief seldom saw the other seven justices on the Court.

Observers now wondered whether, with the departure of Justice Roberts, the Chief Justice's opinions would return to the former liberal tone of years prior to the war or whether he would shortly choose to retire as the last survivor of the days of the "nine old men" who had challenged the New Deal.

As indicated, Chief Justice Stone would not retire but would pass away on April 22, 1946. His successor would be Fred Vinson, new Secretary of the Treasury.

The column next congratulates the St. Louis Star-Times for taking to task "the eleventh hour", a commentary being broadcast during the Lutheran Hour on radio, claiming that the photographs of concentration camps had been faked. Lawrence Reilly, the purveyor of the propaganda, was put off the air by the Star-Times expose.

Senator Theodore Bilbo, he informs, had on his desk during his filibuster of the bill to make permanent the Fair Employment Practices Committee, the book by Dr. Rayford Logan of Howard University, What the Negro Wants.

Yet, there was something artificial about the unchanged appearance of Paris. It had suffered unseen changes during the four years of Nazi occupation. Internal struggle was evident politically, centering on responsibility for the defeat in 1940. The coming winter, it was believed, would bring disturbances by spring. The black market remained still the basis for the economy.

General De Gaulle had concentrated on nationalism and imperial power to rebuild national pride. But France remained a weak country and adding to it the African Empire of the Moroccans, Arabs, Sengalese, and others would not alter the case.

The resulting problem was that many of the researchers who had produced the weaponry for the war would be lost to the universities and government research and would go to work for private industry at higher salaries. It could result in permanent damage to the heart of the nation's scientific advance, akin to scrapping half the fleet. By contrast, the Russians were maintaining their scientific research laboratories.

A bill pending in Congress would rectify the problem by deferring 20,000 qualified eighteen-year olds who demonstrated aptitude in scientific and technical fields and training them in those areas.

Dr. Bush had been a principal administrator of the Manhattan Project, in just six days about to show its first results at the Trinity Test Site in New Mexico, and then its first deployed weapon over Hiroshima on August 6.

"It seems all wrong, as a picture: it would make us look like a temperance society which sold booze in order to finance its good works."

The proponents attempted to shut down counter-argument to the proposal by saying that it should be left to experts to determine the policy with respect to Hirohito, and that if it would save American lives by shortening the war, the general public should not be heard to disagree with it. Mr. Grafton finds this notion dangerous in a democracy.

Another argument against the idea was that America had demonstrated in the past its lack of talent for inventing social systems for other countries. American tradition rested on lack of planning in society and so it ran counter to this tradition to assert plans for other lands.

The plan was to protect Hirohito once the peace was achieved, that his enemies would become the enemies to America, both those internally and externally. It did not appear as a role to which America was accustomed or well suited.

It did, however, appear to fit the pattern thus far followed in the post-war, that of providing support to the worst form of government available for the conquered, not one patterned on American life. The very problems besetting Japan had emanated from the ruling circles and it was therefore troubling that it was now proposed that those circles be preserved.

Mr. Grafton decided to place the assertions of the experts on this topic in the same drawer in which he had filed their other assertions of the late thirties with regard to Japan: that it would never make war on the United States.

Never mind all that. America was about to eclipse the Rising Sun, even if the Emperor and his Empress would be allowed to remain and even be entertained on occasion at the White House in coming years.