Advertisement

Yesterday

Trouble, Araki, Leipzig

With heavy hearts and dire foreboding the Administration looks ahead to the meeting of Congress next January, realizing that the opening of the grousing season cannot be long delayed. Already keen ears in Washington detect the cocking of shotguns all over the country, a sound unpleasing to the natives. Henry Ford has rallied about him a brave band of those who, for various reasons fear the implications of enforced codes. The farm bloc, temporarily placated by the burnt offering of a devaluated dollar, can be expected to provide a great deal of clamor and possibly some force if the latest monetary scheme does not raise its commodity prices. And off in his corner, cleaning his battered blunderbuss and muttering imprecations about broken campaign pledges, sits little G.O.P., eager for the January fray. Indicative of the changing, wavering attitude of the public is yesterday's Herald-Tribune front page "news-story" which analyzes the disconcerting present and the uncertain future of the NRA, thus laying down a gangplank from which to disembark without incurring the charge of sudden desertion of the ship. On top of all this comes, as we have pointed out, the impending convention of the country's Mad Hatters. Bad as things appear to be now, by January there may be loud, insistent cries for an American Guy Fawkes.

* * *

Two days ago General Araki, the fulminating spokesman of Tokio, invited all interested powers to gather and discuss the Asiatic problem with Japan, a proposal which was welcomed by the "interested" countries as an opportunity to return the snubs which the Rising Sun Empire has handed out these last few years. A Japanese offer of international arbitration over Manchukuo is a gesture lost upon these major nations whose own history contains so many examples of the well-known imperialistic principle, "Shoot first and be asked questions afterwards."

* * *

Determined to drag out the Reichstag Fire Trial until the last Nazi has perjured himself, the Leipzig court has introduced a dozen more reputable Hitlerite witnesses who have duly sworn that Herren Torgler, Dimitroff, Taneff, and Popoff were six places at once on the night of the incendiarism. Quite the most ingenious charge to date was made yesterday by a good brownshirt who asserted that Torgler had tried to get him to burn the building "so that suspicion would be placed on the Nazis." The strategical brilliance of this move would have escaped any but a Nazi. CASTOR.

Advertisement
Advertisement