Mr. Charles M. Schwab, once a tedious exponent of the view that depression was all in the eye of the beholder, began in 1931 to mourn that there were no rich men any more, and has just abandoned this strain to move one inch closer to the bathos in which his oracle is suspended. Now, we are told, the people has passed through its crucible, and is prepared for the higher things which someone, perhaps Mr. Schwab, delayed until it could appreciate them. One almost expects that Mr. Schwab will wink indulgently and produce a cornucopia from under his coattails, unless one already knows that subtle wedding of economic ingenuousness and business ingenuity which is Mr. Schwab's mind.

Even the stockholders of the Bethlehem Steel Corporation have long exhibited a polite lack of interest when Mr. Schwab's views on the depression have been mentioned. But his position is the eminently reasonable one for those whose capitalism is not congenital but acquired. For the old rule, that those who are industrious and good shall have the earth and survive, and that those who are lazy and dissolute shall have nothing and perish, is a rule which Mr. Schwab has applied with conspicuous success. Through that rule, and a nice adjustment of principle, Mr. Schwab became chairman of Bethlehem, administered its affairs during the war with strength and dexterity, and gave it a surplus of which the jolliest profiteers were envious.

That surplus, however, has been strangely volatile. Mr. Schwab himself cannot quite believe that it is gone. For a while the realization stripped him of his old arrogance, but instead of giving him a subdued wisdom, adversity merely tempted his friends to poke a curious finger through him, and his enemies to come gingerly within his range. But Bethlehem's late lawyer once remarked, when he was drawing up its famous percentage contract with the government, that "The higher optimism is to hope for a little pessimism in Charley Schwab." So Mr. Schwab is once more sanguine. Perhaps he is feels that he might at least pretend has is having a feast when the shining Marxian angel draws her bloody finger across his wall.