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So where are we on this day of the Epiphany, January 6, 2006?

Perhaps, we would venture, riding the Tiger.

Damned if sometimes it doesn't wont one to take a motorcycle trip all the way to Argentina, and see twice again what they saw...

Typically, we only kill our own, dreams and all.

Being for the benefit of whom? That is our question.

A Thousand Nights, a Thousand Days, a Thousand Pieces, a Thousand Years, and a Thousand Points of Light...Thousands upon Thousands

So when do we learn the most simple lesson of all?

Widely separated but closely connected were two stories in the paper yesterday afternoon. The first, under a Washington dateline, disclosed that for the seventh week in succession WPA rolls had been cut. From 3,139,245 on Dec. 10, they had come down to 3,083,249 on Dec. 17.

The other story was laid in Charlotte. The County Welfare Department, it was reported, was having a sudden onslaught of applicants for relief who had been let off by WPA. And since the County gives relief only to those who are not able-bodied, the immediate prospects of these discharged WPAers looked anything but bright.

They put to the various governments concerned a very acute problem.

A third story having to do with relief, but preceding the foregoing by a day or so, may have some bearing on this problem. It is generally conceded that the Federal Government is bound to cut down on relief. But this can be done, to begin with, at any rate, with less shock than by discharging from WPA workers who are heads of families and who have no other resources. We should think that the place to start would be with the Federal Theater, say, which is relief de luxe, or with the Federal Writers Project, or with the administrative and supervisory personnel of WPA, whose jobs frequently are in settlement of some political obligation.

Or--and this is where the third story comes in--with the National Youth Administration. Mr. Aubrey Williams reports that NYA roles in October, 1938, increased by 68,000 over October, 1937, "as a result," in part, "of enlarged fund quotas to educational institutions." Verily, it may be essential to keep the boys and girls in school, but not so essential by half as to keep men and their families in food.

The little Franco-Italian comedy, Messires, is playing to the end. And Pantalone-Spaviento, the Italian merchant-bragpot, otherwise Benito the Little Donkey, has, as was to be expected, quite the best of Le Capitan Fracasse, otherwise La Belle France.

Three considerations, we guess, have been at stake in the business all along. One of them was that Daladier is in imminent danger of losing his job, because of the resentment of labor and Frenchmen who didn't like the Munich deal. Hitler didn't want Daladier to fall, had warned against it. Neither did Mussolini want it. And neither did Bumble of England, for if Daladier fell Bumble was almost certain to come tumbling after. The second consideration was that Mussolini, mad about the fact that Hitler has been getting all the booty, wanted Franco recognized so as to win a speedy victory in Spain, that Hitler was backing him, that Bumble was eager to give it to them, and that Daladier, willing enough, didn't dare do it [indiscernible word] he could scare the French people into acquiescence. The third was that Mussolini also wanted a big hunk of the French holdings in the Suez Canal, and other lesser concessions--all of which Daladier was willing to grant if he could make the French people agree.

And what we have been seeing has almost certainly been simply a little game--perhaps only tacit--designed to the end of setting the stage for all this. Frenchmen have been frightened by Mussolini's threats into setting up solidly behind Daladier. And he now feels that his job is so safe that he makes bold to announce that he's willing to give Italy "concessions"--which means the Suez stock and other things. And Bumble is obviously warming up the room for the role of "mediator." The recognition of Franco is not explicitly announced as in the cards yet, but it will probably be along before long.

As far as lynching goes, the Negro was somewhat safer in Dixie this year than he has been for a long time. The hope for a completely clear record for 1938, engendered by the fact that there had been no lynching in the year up until July 1, went aglimmering in the second half of the year. Up until Dec. 24, the score stood at six victims, according to the figures of the Tuskegee Institute, as against eight in each of the years 1937 and 1936, and as against 20 in 1935.

But if the Negro was safer as far as lynching goes, he wasn't, if the figures for Charlotte are typical, even as safe against being murdered by other Negroes. Last year the city had 27 murders, all the victims and all the killers being Negroes. This year, it has already had 30. One victim was white, but for the rest, the victims and the trigger men were blacks.

All of which prompts us to conclude that what the black man in Dixie seems to need is not a Federal law to save him from being lynched--the South itself is doing better and better about that--but one to save him from being murdered by other Negroes.

In his latest pronouncement, Boss Frank (I Am the Works) Hague, podesta extraordinary of Jersey City, links Norman Thomas, Roger Baldwin and Arthur T. Vanderbilt together as Communists all.

So far as Dr. Thomas goes that seems a little odd. For Dr. Thomas is the chief of the Fabian Socialists in this country--than whom the brethren of the Moscow dispensation have no deadlier foes. And just as odd is the case of Mr. Baldwin, a pacifist and author of "Liberty Under the Soviets," a book which is a good deal less than enthusiastic about life in Red land. But oddest of all is the case of Mr. Vanderbilt--a member of one of the chiefest of American families of Economic Royalists, and a former president of the American Bar Association.

But there is no real mystery about any of this. And if you grant Hague's definition of a Communist, then he's right--all these strangely assorted birds are Reds. For Thomas has fought for the constitutional right of free speech: Baldwin, as Secretary of the American Civil Liberties Union, has done the same: and so has Mr. Vanderbilt by serving as Dr. Thomas's lawyer in his dispute with Boss Hague. And about a year ago the latter defined a Communist in this fashion:

"We beef about constitutional rights, free speech and the free press. Every time I hear these words I say to myself, 'That man is a Red, and that man is a Communist.'"

Not even the staunchest advocates of Prohibition can fail, surely, to have profound misgivings at its creation of an affluent and influential class of criminals, the bigshot bootleggers. Nor can the flourishing of these gentry be excused away as a lesser evil than the open sale of liquor, for the plain undebatable fact is that in this city liquor is still being sold, if not quite openly, at least with what amounts to immunity for the larger, better known operators. The quantity that is sold defies any exact estimate, but that it is sold in quantity is a statement which will have to be conceded by the most earnest defenders of Prohibition.

And being persons who obviously set store by morality, they probably realize that this is not only a harmful influence on citizens who continue to buy whisky, thus lightly violating the law, but that the lucrative trade it has handed over to a class of men least qualified to receive it is an exceedingly ominous development. Fully as ominous, let us say, as the old concentration of money and political power in the liquor interests and saloon politicians and corrupt police forces.

We refuse to believe that Prohibitionists in Charlotte or elsewhere in the dry territory of the state can tolerate so dangerous a situation without at least giving objective thought to any proposed means of bettering it. It is to them directly, therefore, that we address a proposal which has as its chief claim to consideration that it will strike the bootleggers, the big shots who never handle a bottle save for their own refreshment, where they are vulnerable and that is in the pocketbook, the well and the fountain of their power.

***

Objections to liquor stores such as the State operates in 28 of its counties are (1) that no government has the right to pander to the appetites of its citizens; (2) that the open, unhindered display and sale of liquor is likely to prove a temptation in politics and be a corrupting influence in politics. And these objections are, to do them full credit, ponderable, but the virtue of our proposal is that it circumvents all but the first of them, which is purely dogmatic.

Our proposal is that the State open up a mail order business in whisky, four quarts to a shipment, for the benefit of the dry counties. At once the bootlegger loses the greater part of his trade: the case-lot customers who buy from him as a matter of necessity, not of choice. At once he feels the stifling hand of governmental competition, which is about to run bootlegging completely out of the control counties. His profit being drastically curtailed, he begins to lack the wherewithal to bribe his way, and influence elections. Being without money, he is without friends, and, he is brought low and reduced to the status of a common crook, which he happens to have been all along.

***

Chances are that little of this whisky-by-mail would find its way into any other except personal use. Two years of experience with the State Board of Alcoholic Control has been enough to show that this board is of trustworthy character, well aware that its responsibilities only begin with the legal sale of liquor. It would be enabled to extend its enforcement activities into the counties from which its mail order revenue came.

Revenue--ah, yes. There would be revenue: revenue that is now going in bulk to the bootleggers and in driblets to remote legal liquor stores. There would be, in all probability, much revenue, to be divided, say, between the State and the County of its origin.

The revenue is secondary. The challenge that faces the Prohibitionists in North Carolina is, first and last, the bootleggers, the "Robert Taylors" with whom they and the law are helpless to deal. And mail order business in liquor, on terms laid down by the Legislature and under the administration of the Alcoholic Control Board, would reassert the authority of the law and cut the bootlegger down to his rightful size.