Following a conference with his economic encourage, the President has announced that the government will enter the European market for gold. Although this should have been obvious to all who had examined the basis of his program for the commodity dollar, Wall Street chose to pull a face long enough to upset the day's trading and between the money changer and the moneychanger an unpleasant altercation threatens to develop. More significant than this, however, is the effect which the President's action must have on the growing tide of economic nationalism. A frank and cynical attempt by a great nation to jockey itself into a favorable agricultural market at the expense of its neighbors is a sad thing to see; fortunately M. Daladier's murmurings can no longer prevent France from leaving the gold standard, and so palliating the situation, but the basic ugliness is there and will not be obscured.

Many observers have pointed out that the only logical conclusion to the policy of economic isolation now being pursued by the great nations of the world is a return to primitive industrial methods the resuscitation of feudalism and the economy of the village. Obviously the ruling interests, in whatever country, cannot permit the reaction to go so far as this, and their only alternative will be a series of imperialist wars with the object of national enslavement. At present Mr. Roosevelt, Mr. Hitler, Mr. MacDonald, Mr. Mussolini, and, I dare say, M. Daladier's successor are each aiming for the vast golden apple of imperialism, expansion of exports and restriction of imports. Each of them has stated this explicitly. None of them has suggested how it can be simultaneously achieved by everybody. But it does not take a very piercing vision to see what will happen if it be simultaneously attempted by everybody, although some may cloak it as a "favorable monetary position" and others bare it as international Fascism.

Secretary Ickes has pacified Governor Murray by assuring him that the National Recovery Administration does not really intend to dispossess the forty thousand Oklahomans on "uneconomic marginal lands." The Secretary only meant that it might be a good thing if "uneconomic" agricultural pursuits were discontinued, as indeed it would. But the clash, monetary as it was, yet succeeded in raising a problem at once delicate and important. What is the position of the individual in the face of the drastic national administration of the Recovery Act?

Mr. Murray gave a pragmatic reply. He threatened to call out the state militia if the Secretary disturbed his "uneconomic" constituents. There is no essential difference between Governor Murray's threat and the threat of Jefferson Davis to the Union in 1860. Washington used another word then, but the conflict of individual and national interests is substantially the same in either case. Governor Murray is a constitutional lawyer of great ability and vision. He realizes that the proud boast of James M. Beck that we have no administrative law is a medal with two sides, and that it would be quite as reasonable for us to boast, with the Tartars of old, that we have no civil law. It is true that we have no sanctioned and unified administrative law; it is a tribute to the Governor's realism that he sees the infinite possibilities of administrative lawlessness which this implies. POLLUX.