One of the most important groups of initials in the New Deal is the modest, but far-reaching experiment in the South, the T.V.A., which, being interpreted, means the Tennessee Valley Authority. Headed by David Lillienthal and Frank Morgan, this offspring of the Administration's left-wing is beginning to cause no small commotion over its plans and projects. All the doughty adherents of decentralization in industry are rallying around with drum and fife, eager to explore the possibilities of small units of production based on partial or complete use of the cheap electricity which the series of gigantic dams and power plants now constructed, under construction, or merely planned, are designed to furnish to the Valley. Blueprints have been laid out for the creation of model, attractive towns for the workers to be employed. Schemes for part-subsistence farming are buried about by hopeful prophets. There are a hundred-and-one proposals in the air, of differing degrees of soundness and imaginative quality.

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But beside these various sketches for Utopia there is another side to the T.V.A., which cannot be slighted, and probably will not be, since it runs into the old battleground of government vs. private interests. This side is the determination by the Federal authorities to operate the existing power-generating plants in competition with new stations as well. The T.V.A. gives them warning to cooperate, reduce rates, or face the competition of duplicate plants. Over this entire question there has been thrown a great deal of confusion, adulterated with considerable propaganda. Experts and college professors, publicists and Congressmen have been bought up and subsidized by the usual "interested parties," and a great deal of utter bilge has been printed to demonstrate that government ownership, operation, and control, separately or collectively, are inefficient, wasteful, and corrupt. If the cost-accounts of the Tennessee plants are accurately kept and made public for general inspection, the experiments in the Valley offer hope of a final solution to this murky problem. Thus far, at any rate, the T.V.A. has proved to be the one ace Roosevelt has pulled from his immaculate sleeve which gives undeniable pretext for prolonged huzzahs and justifiable optimism. CASTOR