Mr. Farley's little play is becoming too much for him. The stands everywhere convicted; either as the devious promoter of an assistant Tammany ticket to break the anti-Tammany vote, or as the clumsy agent of the President's disgust with Tammany and his determination to set up a less heinous Democracy in New York. Both of these accusations cannot be true; indeed it is difficult to decide which of them is, but in any case the Secretary has bogged himself in an unpretty fashion, and must lose much of the political prestige which alone made him valuable.

On the one hand, Mr. Curry has snared him into tacit support of Dr. O'Brien; on the other, Mr. Schurman is peppering him as a black deceiver, not to be endured in any of his works and pomps, uninterested in good government or indeed in anything but the governorship. What assault he will suffer at the hands of his real victim, Mr. LaGuardia, remains to be seen, but it is clear that he cannot but emerge from the New York campaign as that most inexcusable of offenders in a democracy, the man of mystery, the friend of none and the suspect of all. It is of small moment which game the Secretary has been playing; all the talent is against him, and will be against him through the battle, and he cannot explain himself to the public without losing the prospect of his mission. Perhaps the easy success to which any anti-Hoover candidate would have come seduced the great Secretary into dreams of electoral mastery; but the rough and tumble of a New York campaign should leave him content with new stamp issues and public speaking safely cloistered from the razor minds which discomfort him.

* * *

Henry Louis Mencken, having been divorced from the finances of the American Mercury last-year, now announces his resignation from its editorship. No one will blame him for his unwillingness to be the last seaman on board a vessel which is patently enreefed, but many will be sorry that the Mercury has come to be such a vessel. Its function, basting the prosperous and needling the Rotarian, is outlived in time when Rotarians are impecunious and craven and the imbecilities of their heyday clotured by depression. The protuberances which the Mercury swatted have largely sunk back into the primeval slime from which they came; and those who liked to see them swatted have turned their minds to other things. But to identify the decline of the Mercury with the decline of Mr. Mencken is a sorry fallacy; one was an instrument fitted to an age which was impermanent, and has passed away, but the other has a task, and an activity, that cannot be so limited. H. L. M. will continue as our republic's most original and vital intellectual force; the Mercury is dead, but Mr. Mencken will survive, to use his last rugged phrase in the apt confounding of a dolt. POLLUX.