The Charlotte News

Thursday, December 8, 1938

FIVE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The Franco-German Agreement of December 6--referenced in "Italian Comedy" and which would last, despite all the mighty might, Michael and all, of its signatories, however divinely they managed, all of eighteen months--went thusly:

We include the below sketch because of its culinary correction offered by the editors. Of no moment otherwise. Maybe Mr. Arnold's friend's grocer friend was thinking of ruote.

(Billy Arthur, New Bern Tribune)

J. Gaskill McDaniel called up the other night and asked me to settle a ten cent argument. And I told him I'd do my best on condition they didn't draw me into it.

"We've got a couple of grocers out here arguing about spaghetti. One declares that raw spaghetti, before it's cooked, has holes in it."

"That's macaroni," I broke in.

"Wait a minute and let me get through," Joe requested. "The other fellow says it doesn't have. What do you know about it?"

And then's where I confided that the only spaghetti I ever saw was without holes, but the only thing I can say for certainty was that one of the fellows was wrong.

"Thanks a whole lot," Joe said and hung up.

[Service: Macaroni is tubular, spaghetti solid--Food Editors of The News.]

You can say what you please, but this Michael Mouse business has plainly penetrated to the kingdom between our walls and got the pride of the whole race up. First, they took to coming out in the middle of the floor and singing. Then there was one in London who climbed up into a cage and sang duets with a canary. After that, again, there was Herman, that Brooklyn Siegfried who slew a boa constrictor deluded by the thought that he was going to use Herman as a hors d'oeuvre--Herman whose saga we have already set down in these columns.

And still it goes on. At Moss Hill Grammar School in Boston, Michael's brethren have taken to coming coolly out into the schoolroom, regardless of the presence of students--so much so that the students are taking cats to school to protect them. And at Lincoln, Neb., yesterday a court had to stop a manslaughter trial until a bailiff could take out a mouse that had been disporting himself about the bar enclosure and standing up on his hind legs, with folded arms, to listen to and observe the proceedings.

Don't you dare laugh the next time your frau lets out a squeak, and climbs a table when a mouse stalks into the room. You'd better climb up there yourself.

Nobody can accuse the City Council of rushing impetuously ahead yesterday in its resolution to establish a housing authority. Three and a half years ago the Legislature passed a nineteen-page law declaring the necessity and authorizing the creation of housing authorities, and the topic has been under discussion almost ever since.

In those 42 months the City has worked its way to the third page, sub-section 2 of Section 4, of that lengthy statute, and has arrived finally at the point where something may actually be done about housing conditions. Let no one assume that this has to take the form of an application to the USHA for a project. Not a bit of it, although that may turn out to be desirable.

The authority's powers are extensive. As an illustration, consider these two clauses from the statute:

What this newly-created housing authority could be, under its extensive powers, is a city planning commission for blighted areas. Verily, the Council may have taken a greater forward step yesterday than it knew.

It was a curious spectacle, that one yesterday of one New Deal agency, TVA, flatly refusing Mr. Wendell Willkie's plan to allow another, SEC, to arbitrate the dispute as to what is a fair price for the properties of the Tennessee Electric Power Company. Does TVA suspect that SEC will not bring in a fair price--that one part of the New Deal can't be trusted to deal fairly by another? Well, Mr. Willkie says it is no such thing--that on the contrary TVA is afraid that SEC will bring in a fair price--and that TVA doesn't want a fair price but a price that would justify its "yardstick" rates regardless.

About that we can't say positively, but what can be said positively is that TVA plainly means to set its own figure. Mr. Krug, the TVA engineer, says indeed that he wants a price "set by negotiation around the conference table." But can't you just hear that "negotiation"?

"Well, Mr. Willkie, we think this is a fair price. Oh, you don't think so? Well, now, ain't that just too bad? All the same, Mr. Willkie, you had better take it. Oh, gettin' tough, eh? Well, well, well, that being the case, we'll simply call on Mr. Ickes and his PWA to build duplicate plants to compete with yours. We'd hate to do that, Mr. Willkie, but it would enable us to buy you out for half price in the end. And now, on reconsideration, don't you really agree with us, Mr. Willkie, that our price is eminently fair? Ah, we knew you were a reasonable man, Mr. Willkie. That's what we always say: no reason for fighting when reasonable people like us can settle things at the conference table."

As surely as though they had murdered their guards while they slept, the escape of eleven prisoners from the State's convict camp in Anson County on Oct. 22 was directly responsible for the killing of the two police officers in Burlington yesterday. Indeed, one may go further and state flatly that the greatest single menace to the lives of police officers in North Carolina lies in these all too numerous escaped convicts.

From the very circumstances of their break for freedom it follows that they are violent. Turning immediately to crime again, they are almost certain to have a run-in with the cops, and being outlaws and hunted men, they calculate desperately that it is a case of kill or be killed.

The State owes it to itself and police officers throughout the state to prevent their escape. It is the weakness of what is otherwise a commendable and practical system of working prisoners on the roads, instead of cooping them up in cells. But there are many prisoners with whom such a chance cannot, out of consideration for guards and police officers, be taken, and such a one was the convict Huffman who killed and was killed in Burlington yesterday.

Sent up in April of this year for six to ten years on eight counts of breaking and entering and lesser crimes, his criminal record at that time showed:

His father before him had been a safe cracker, so that bad blood ran in his veins. And Penal Director Robert Grady Johnson had him down as a thrill-seeker who he feared "would kill somebody sooner or later."

There's only one thing to do--two things--with men of such violent and evident criminal tendencies. One is, to keep them behind high stone walls in barred cells for the duration of their prison terms. The other: at the fourth or fifth felony to commit them to such residence for life.

What the shouting in Italy is about begins to emerge fairly clearly. Probably, it is all a little comedy directed to the end of bluffing the French into recognizing Franco's government in Spain.

Nobody doubts, of course, that the demands of the deputies, students and official stooge editor Gayda, for Tunisia, Corsica, Nice, and Savoy, took place only under signal from Mussolini, who in turn certainly did not give the signal without consulting Hitler. But the Duce has carefully refrained from saying anything himself. Mr. Bumble of England has assured Parliament that Musso has assured his agents that Italy has no designs on French territory--despite the uproars. And yesterday Mr. Hitler's agents, on signing the new hocus-pocus Franco-German agreement, solemnly assured M. Daldier that Der Furious has no designs for planting himself in Spain.

Thus the stage is set. What we may very well see now is Mr. Hitler coming forth to play "mediator," and gently suggesting that, since concessions are necessary on both sides, France recognize Franco in return for Musso's promises to lay off the lands she has no claims on. Then Bumble of England, who has been kept from recognizing Franco long ago only by French stubbornness, will no doubt clap his hands and cry, "Bravo! Splendid!" And Daladier--it is not impossible that Daladier is a party to the whole business behind the scenes. Anyhow, he'll probably accept. And then Musso will give the "desist" signal, and the uproars in Italy will die abruptly for the time being, and M. Daladier will inform the French people that he has just won another famous victory for them, as Bumble will tell the English that peace is once more safe for our time.