Former Mayor Curley's method of campaigning is almost enough to induct him as unworthy of the Governorship of Massachusetts, even if no consideration is made of his record as Mayor of Boston and as a politician. Mr. Curley's tactics are similar to those of a parasite existing by living off of a large fish. In this case Mr. F. D. Roosevelt plays the part of the fish. Mr. James Roosevelt and Postmaster General Jim Farley constitute a weak kind of sticking plaster that keeps the parasite clinging to the fish. The fish, however, like real fish that carry parasites, is apparently unaware of Mr. Curley's attachment to him; at least he does not try to shake him off or even notice him, because this whole business of Mayor Curley being the Massachusetts Roosevelt man is very embarrassing to President Roosevelt. Mr. Roosevelt is a politician; so he tries to make the ward-boss type of political worker think he likes Curley and at the same time tries to keep men like Professor Taussig thinking he has not forgotten his sense of honesty and political efficiency amid his efforts to build up party solidarity. Sometimes it looks as if Mr. Roosevelt just simply does not know where he stands.

The Administration's Federal relief system is an instance of a two-sided affair. From one side it is excellent; the government is handing out charity to the helpless victims of an economic crisis; in fact one must say that it is hardly charity, but duty that causes the government to do this. But with national elections at hand the whole thing seems to resemble a great nation-wide system of bribery--it is legal, of course; but none the less the arrangement has the ear-marks of bribery--on the part of the Democratic Party to catch the votes of the needy. The resources of the United States Treasury are sufficient to make the purse of many a voter heavier. And who would expect someone receiving money from the HOLC, CWA, or any other alphabetical combination to vote against a New Dealer. There is something quite doubtful in the ethics of allowing those on Federal relief to vote in Federal elections. Of course Mr. Roosevelt would no more point this out than he would repudiate Curley.

One surprising thing, after considering the enormous vote getting resources available to the New Dealers is that Mr. Roosevelt and his policies did not fare better than they did in the last Literary Digest poll. It begins to look as if the ability of Mr. Roosevelt as a politician has been overrated, if we consider the enormous number of people in the country who are sure to vote for him, for no other reason than because they are on Mr. Roosevelt's relief lists. Perhaps Mr. Roosevelt is not a great politician but only a great evader of questions and issues and a great forgetter of campaign and Inaugural promises.

Another thing that has become almost as puzzling as its general evasiveness is the high-handedness of the Administration in certain instances. The matter of the air-mail contracts was one instance of this. A case of the same thing, with a far more sinister aspect because it involved a good deal of falsehood in it, was the threat to the Hawaiian Islands delivered by Mr. Wesley Sturges, a Yale professor of law and erstwhile brain-truster with the A.A.A., last summer in Honolulu. Mr. Sturges came to Hawaii to arrange the sugar quotas to be allotted to the plantations in the islands. At the same time the Hawaiian Sugar Planters' Association was preparing to file a suit in Washington to restrain Secretary Wallace from enforcing the Costigan-Jones sugar-quota law in Hawaii. The planters' contention was--and it appears quite justifiable--that the Hawaiian Islands had received an unfairly low quota. But the merits of the suit do not matter. What does matter is that Mr. Sturges gave a speech over the radio in which he told the people of Hawaii that if the H.S.P.A. lost the suit it would of course do them no good and also that if they won the suit the continental United States sugar markets would be automatically closed to them. Of course this last contention is sheer bunk; and most of the AAA people knew it. But the purpose of Mr. Sturges' speech was to attempt to fool the people of Hawaii into believing that the Island would be economically ruined if the H.S.P.A. won! The Islands were not fooled but were enraged. Officials in Washington admitted the speech was a "trial balloon"; and Mr. Sturges was "transferred."

So far the depression is not over; Roosevelt is growing less popular and less respected. What next? Watch New York, Pennsylvania, California, and Minnesota. Plenty is going to happen.

What actually will happen is hard to say. But, considering what has taken place in the last two years, both in Washington and in the minds of the people, it looks as if the American Legion, the D.A.R. and the American Liberty League are were to see a good many innovations closely resembling one or another of those things they call un-American. It does not appear that the United States of 1934 can be run in the same manner as the United States of 1789, in spite of the nostalgia of those three associations for those good old days. Of course the people of their ilk might step in and take control; but that would be fascism or something like it and not very close to the days of 1789. Not even Franklin Roosevelt or Herbert Hooever or Upton Sinclair or Commander Hayes of the American Legion can hope to supply a cure for our troubles and still cling to the methods of a hundred and fifty years ago. The most alarming thing is that in spite of the efforts of the last two years we are really no nearer the solution of our problems than before. Perhaps we should try a new method of attack.