It was "protective custody" into which Congressman Jerry O'Connell was taken in Jersey City last night, the same kind of custody in which Mr. Hitler specializes.

It sounds exactly like a Storm Trooper reporting on Pastor Niemoeller. But for that matter, the Congressman probably did want to go home. For when he got to the place where he was going to speak, there was a huge crowd, armed with sticks and missiles, and they had a chorus which ran, "Kill him!" More than that, a crowd outside the police station continually cheered the cops after they had forbidden him to speak.

We need not, however, believe that Jersey City as a whole was a party to the crime. It was all carefully organized. One Hugh Kelly, secretary to Boss Hague's stooge Governor of New Jersey, Harry Moore, called a meeting night before last and organized it--announced flatly that he'd have his American Legion gang on hand to see that the Congressman was denied the first of American rights--that of free speech.

Meantime Boss Hague remains Vice-Chairman of the Democratic National Committee, and the President of the United States, who could have him removed for a mere nod of the head, does exactly nothing.

With the jury's acquittal of young Donald Carroll for the confessed murder of his sweetheart, a new plea is given uncodified standing in American jurisprudence. It takes rank along with the unwritten law and the sort of self-defense that was claimed by the Kentucky Garr boys when they shot General Denhart as he ran from them as fast as his legs could carry him.

Obviously, Donald's attorneys had to think of a new one. To put a pistol to the heart of your love as she lay with her eyes closed, chattering on to keep herself from screaming aloud; to pull the trigger only to find that no bullet had yet been injected into the gun's chamber; to work the carriage to make sure that the bullet was in firing position, and then to pull the trigger--ah, no; that would hardly come under the head of self-defense. And the unwritten law would not have applied, since the unwritten law is not to be invoked save against some despoiler of your wife or your daughter. In fact, for Donald's attorneys even to have mentioned the unwritten law would have been extremely tactless, not to say a downright faux pas, for the despoiler in that courtroom was the accused himself, Donald Carroll Jr., father of the child in Charlotte Matthiesen's womb.

No, a brand-new plea was badly needed by young Donald, and the jury's verdict indicates that his attorneys hit upon it. Murder by request--not a mercy killing, you understand, but a killing to obviate the embarrassment of people's finding out that a boy and a girl had got themselves a baby illegitimately, a killing to do away with the mother of the child and the embryo itself, a killing to save the girl from shame and the feeling of tragedy that was smothering her--go free, Donald Carroll! Thou couldst not have loved thyself half so well had thou not loved thine honor more.

The President is thoroughly logical when he argues that, under the system of taxation according to ability to pay, there is no reason why a $500,000 profit on stocks should be taxed at the same rate as a $5,000 profit on stocks. He makes sense again when he says that, under the same system, there should be a strong compulsion upon corporations to disgorge their profits instead of withholding them to save some large stockholder from having to pay thumping surtaxes on his individual income.

But the President has nobody to blame except himself for repudiation by Congress of two basic income tax principles. Year after year he has stressed the great importance of co-ordinating the whole Federal tax system, and year after year, peremptorily and without warning, he has pitched Congress a ready-made tax bill and said, "Here, boys; put this through for me before you wind up." The bill containing the undistributed profits tax is an excellent illustration. It was not even presented to Congress until March, 1936--March of an election year. It followed on the heels of a new tax law enacted the year previous--and before that tax law had even gone into effect. It was jammed through Congress despite its radical nature and admitted inequities, all because Mr. Roosevelt, after four years of calling for co-ordination of the Federal tax system, was in a hurry for a new and completely different kind of tax.

It was another case of haste's making waste, the waste being the repudiation by Congress of taxation principles so sound that Mr. Roosevelt finds himself unable to sign the bill eliminating them.

But, remember that, in the parable anyway, Cain slew Abel; so don't try to stimulate it artificially ever, without a qualified physician or paramedic doing the stimulating in a true life-threatening emergency, even if Cain is said to cure your headache.

For old Cain is wont to cause heartache by the numbers, babe. And he will definitely cure your headache, some say for good.

Once, when we were a little tyke, we broke out in spots, everywhere. Had to stay home from school so as not to infect the others. We were sure we had something terrible. Spots were getting worse.

Having nothing better to do that day, we started looking in the medical encyclopedia to see what it was we had.

We found it, that which fit all our symptoms--including the apple juice, craving for the sweets, eating a lot, always thirsty. Maybe those spots were boils and carbuncles even.

We decided we had diabetes.

We were afrighted.

All those shots we had heard about. Oh no.

We didn't like that idea at all. Told our mama.

She didn't seem to think so.

We were convinced though.

Fretted about it. Sweated all night about it. Couldn't sleep. We knew we were going to die any day, any moment maybe.

What would that be like? Oh no. Nothingness. What is that? Frightful.

Couldn't sleep.

We had heard all about encephalitis, too--the sleeping sickness. Maybe that was it. Comes from the spots, they say. Looked up the symptoms for that, too. More spots. Oh no. Better not sleep then. Might not awaken.

Worried ourselves sicker.

Turned out we had the German measles.

Too many decades later to count, we're still here--at least we think so.

Went to sleep a lot. Woke up most of the time, too.

Never much worried since about getting sick.

A great man is dead in Baltimore. You will not find his passing recorded on the front pages where politicians thrive. And it is unlikely that even Baltimore will soon get around to giving him a monument along with its men on horseback. He is Dr. John Jacob Abel, and it is quite possible that you never heard his name while he lived. For he was an uncolorful professor of pharmacology at the Johns Hopkins. But all the same, you and every man alive in the civilized world are greatly in his debt.

He did many things, but he did at least two things of capital importance. If you fell over in the street today with a heart attack, the chances are that the doctor would fetch you back to life again with a shot of adrenaline. And this man is the man who first isolated that stuff, the hormone from the supra-renal bodies, two tiny structures clinging to your kidneys. A Japanese chemist, Takamine, visited him before he announced his work, saw what he had done, improved his process a little, and beat him to the draw by taking out a patent on the stuff, as Abel had not intended. But the credit of the thing belongs primarily to Abel.

And the second great achievement? If you came down with diabetes today, it would no longer be necessary for you to resign yourself to a miserable life and a miserable death in coma and convulsions. You'd simply take insulin and lead a pleasant enough life quite as long as you would have lived in any case. Insulin is the isolated hormone of the Islets of Langerhans in the pancreas, and the stuff makes it possible for your body to carry on the digestion of sugar, necessary to your life. This man Abel isolated insulin.