The President's recent fireside talk which has been so hardly dealt with in the conservative Boston press, was motivated, after a long period of silence, by the greatest concert of protest since the latter months of the Hoover administration. There can be no doubt that it was this outcry that called forth the speech, and similarly there can be no doubt that Mr. Roosevelt is well informed of the extent of the outcry, but whether the Boston Tories secure in a brass-bound provincialism, are well aware of the currents of thought elsewhere in the country can fairly be doubted.

The Middle West, which inherits its opinions to a less degree than the East, has swung, at least on the surface, into the anti-administration ranks. In Chicago, pivot of the nation, only the tabloid "Times" still supports the President. Hearst has tuned against him, and Colonels McCormick and Knox, publishers of the "Tribune" and "News" respectively, are both hot-footing it after the Republican nomination in 1936 by editorially out-damning each other in successive editions. The upper middle classes, the lawyers and bankers, are scared and make no bones about the matter. The butcher and baker, rightly accepting the editorial shrieks of the papers as gross exaggerations, are going on a "smoke means fire" theory. Only at the universities, Chicago and Northwestern, does one find any vociferous support of New Deal Policies, but this is, of course, highly localized. The Middle West is veering to the right.

In the South the A.A.A. is being administered with much success, both from the farmers and from party point of view, and what farmer will vote Republicans so as to have easy money taken away in exchange for the rather dubious privilege of tilling unwanted crops? Similar feeling prevails in the South-West, at present shaken by racial trouble, with frequent bombings of Japanese farms by bands of native whites.

California holds fast. The Sunshine State still likes the cards she is being dealt, judging by the recent primaries, and the North-West feels likewise. In the Great Plains the outlook is uncertain, although Presidential responsibility for droughts is a theory not yet completely in the discard.

All of which no matter how it is sliced, comes up to the fact that the Administration had better look to its laurels. The nation as a whole is not yet actively arrayed against Mr. Roosevelt's plans, but his 70 per cent majority of last spring has shifted to an even balance, fearfully easy to disturb, as Congressional elections come in view.

It is true that some regions and some classes are actively antagonistic, but until the opposition puts forward some constructive program which it begins congenitally unable to do, organized trouble is not over likely to develop.

It was in the hope of averting such a blow to Democratic prestige that the radio address was conceived, it was in this spirit that it was delivered, and with the average man, the Boston Herald to the contrary, in this purpose it is quite likely to succeed. DAEDALUS.