To alleviate in some degree the bleakness of the approaching winter comes the new Rooseveltian relief plan, which offers to a critical public a startling solution of the problem of unemployment, but does appear to be a very sensible measure nevertheless. It is a cause for cheering and gesticulation not only on account of its frank admission of the wholesale collapse of state and private charity and the huge necessity of Federal aid, but also because it means another badly-needed demand on the capital-goods industries which will supply the materials and instruments for the public works. Despite all the efforts of the Administration this sector of business is still deep in the dumps; this particular fillip may not do the trick but at any rate it indicates that Washington has its ubiquitous eye on a vital spot.

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Among the various exhibitions of violence in the day's news, two items stand out above the rest. Down in the pleasant, palm-strewn island of Cuba, a native brand of hell burst out in full vigor as civil war recommenced on a sizeable scale. The fight centered about the several armories, police-station, and forts which dot the mainland; gunboats fought it out with land batteries, machine-guns with snipers, while General Batiste directed his troops with aplomb from the depths of his armored car. Perhaps the most discouraging detail of the whole mess is that there seems so little to choose between Grau San Martin, the present dictator, and the A.B.C.'s candidate, Signor Cespedes, than whom no man more resembles a desiccated prune. The other fracas which cropped up recently was the neat assassination of King Nadir Shah of the Afghans at Kabul, the capital of that peculiar nation. Though in natural sympathy with all monarchs who leave their thrones in such precipitous manner, one's grief is slightly lessened for this great soul by the recollection that it was Nadir who rid himself of the obnoxious Ahmad Shah by the simple expedient of blowing him from the muzzle of his biggest cannon.

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As Great Britain prepares "retaliation measures" against the "cheapest dollar in sixty years," Pollux and I are dismayed by the mad scramble of the Nations to give their worldly goods each to the other. The dollar drops in terms of pounds, therefore pounds can buy more dollars, therefore pounds can buy more American products, therefore pounds must not be allowed to buy more American products, because more American products might choke a starving England with the necessities of life.

But there will be an end to all this. The dollar low is accompanied by an unemployment insurance high as 4,000,000 men are added to 12,000,000 now on the British dole or its predecessor. When Mr. Bull finds himself buying food and clothing for twenty-odd million men in government workhouses and training schools, he will for one thing be less interested in the menace of foreign cutthroat competition than in the necessity of importing the necessities of Life on an Island by the most likely means at hand, monetary or otherwise. CASTOR.