Castor has been watching with some trepidation the pre-natal career of the Federal Housing Plan, that incautious boast of the Interior Department, but now that the midwives have ceased their incantations it seems a pretty sorry infant after all. When we heard that Secretary Ickes, having ascertained that 200,000 professional coal miners would be superfluous in the future, had decided upon drastic action, we naturally wondered on whose head the axe would fall, but the coal producers talked their way out of it, and left only the landlords in candidacy. The awful blow has come; the government proposes the platting of 200 subsistence farms by way of recompense to the 200,000 miners, and although there is much verbiage to decorate the gift, everyone but the miners can breathe easily once more.

There is a humour in this plan that cannot but be welcome to those of us who have been wondering how nine million unemployed can be loaded back on to a groaning industrial wagon without the immediate expansion, or inflation, of credit. We can issue for a moment from the praying chamber and look upon the 200 platted farms. They will reassure us. In them, surely, must lie the key to our dilemma, the happy touchstone of our hopes and quietus to our fears. The nine million of which the 200,000 are only a small part need not encumber the wagon; they will each have a platted farm, and from every platted farm will come the loud hosannas of their content.

When a revival of nationalism threatens to make an economic compartment of each of the world's producing and consuming areas, and to dispatch world trade into limbo, it should be obvious, as indeed it seemed once to have been obvious to the administration, that agricultural production must be soberly limited within the United States. The white hope of our agriculture, outside of the ideal solution which would consist in social ownership, is the stimulation of our internal market and purchasing power. Certainly no more lethal a buffoonery than the back-to-the-farm movement could be contrived in the face of this emergency, and yet the melody lingers on many an inflamed and persuasive lip, and threatens to seduce us. The administration, in reviving production and purchasing power, has a difficult hand to play, and ought not to be reaching up its sleeve for the jokers; certainly cutting the market and enlarging the productive units at one time is a joker, and a lugubrious one to boot.

The principle of Mr. Ickes' plan is a disastrous principle; happily it will only be applied in Chopinesque diminuendo, and can wreak no harm. It may even be hooted away before the dreary game of platting has begun, so that the 200 need never set out through the mud. But within the lineaments of this small gimcrack may be discerned what is a very real and very large deficiency in the National Recovery Administration--its distressing lack of coordination, its undeniable muscular ague. Banking recovery has lagged so far behind industrial stimulus as to produce a dangerous gap in credit; Mr. Ickes, in however small a way, is flying directly in the face of economic reason, and building for us bathos. Let the errant horses be yoked to the plow, and the dilatory horses spurred into life, or more than the cotton will be turned under the sod. POLLUX.