With this issue the Crimson introduces to its editorial page a column of comment. It will appear as a regular daily feature, and will deal lightly or seriously, as the writers see fit, with the affairs and concerns of the world.

In the future, editorial opinion on national and foreign affairs will be incorporated in this column instead of in the more formal editorial form. Depending on the space, the column will range from short comments on the day's news to serious expressions of the columnist's opinions of current problems.

Castor tells me that the appearance of Hoover Geheimrat on a Boston silver screen today was the touchstone for a truly inspiriting burst of applause. It was almost as if the new era had not already become the old one, and brought back many memories of the days before the Geheimrat was a grand symbol of spoof, a kind of national jest in apostolic succession to the mother-in-law. Castor diagnosed this as a popular reaction to personal success after personal failure, a sense of comfortable relief among us that he will not be the traditional ex-president, heavy on the national conscience, a kind of standing threat to the President of Princeton and the chief justice of the supreme court. Mr. Hoover has, in his own accounting, halved his working hours and doubled his income, and is in a good way to recoup the losses which his public service occasioned. Strangely apropos to all this seem the words of Harold Laski in the current Harper's: "This democratic elite cannot devote itself to the acquisition of power, of wealth, of authority, for these things are fatal to independence, and their quest breeds men concerned rather with truths that hope for acceptance than with truth." Still, Castor says it is an unpleasant load off his mind, and I am inclined to agree with him.

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Constitutional literalism, strangely enough, has become a great issue with the Southern hinds whose consciences permit the grandfather clauses and the Jim Crow laws, and they are now in full and stupid cry against Judge Lowell. The Crawford decision was outstanding as an example of judicial realism of the most clear and intelligent kind, and is unconstitutional only in protest against an unconstitutionality stupendous in its arrogance and mad in its implications. But more interesting, perhaps, than the fate of any one jurist is the whole problem of the redefinition of constitutionality which will face the ten old men in October. Balancing the Crawford case and the judicial act will be a mere breather beside the dexterity needed to iron out the NRA and the decision in Hammer vs. Dagenhart, which forbids the use of the interstate commerce power as a penalty on antecedent conditions of manufacturers, admittedly the trump around which the whole act is built.

Germany, also, is besieged with problems of constitutionality, although theirs, thanks to the flexibility of Weimar, will be of a different kind. The disposition of a badly unreprosented minority is not so simple as Mr. Ludwig, fresh from Naziland, would have us believe. For him the word majority is a magic philtre, and he cannot say that the Nazis are unable to brew it; thus, although they have burned his books and routed him out, his cavil is not a constitutional one. Castor calls this another example of the megalomania which Mr. Ludwig's essay on Mussolini the strange and uncritical gimcrack it was.

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The passing of Ring Lardner stills another beloved but misunderstood voice. Mr. Lardner, like Mr. Ade, was a complete master of one environment, and within his peculiar limitations a deep and a sincere artist. Much nonsense, of course, has been talked about the bitter smile under the painted grin he wore, and many of the critical faculty could never restrain a condescending note when they spoke, in Mr. Mencken's phrase, of the golden heart that beat beneath the motley. So long as our illuminate gently pat the heads of direct, self possessed, and mature artists and curl their lips at homespun, so long must we be judged in the world as a literary cocktail compounded of six parts young intensity and four parts fragile aniiquarianism. Or so Castor tells me. POLLUX.