No one can blame a man who, fearing for the future of his country, tries to spread the news of her grave peril. But it becomes a little wearying to find the eminent journalist, Mark Sullivan, spawning article after article with but one theme: that the Administration has two wings of opinion, one right, one left; that the Right has a monopoly over the good, the true, the beautiful but is lax in asserting its eminence; and that the Left is composed of young radical professors who combine fluttery, unsound minds with amazing, sinister shrewdness in hypnotizing the President. It appears that Rex Tugwell, for one, "has studied the recent revolutions in Europe painstakingly and knows the technique of carrying America from individualism to collectivism as minutely as a farmer knows the technique of raising a crop," and that the Brain Trust in general is rushing America forward with deadly persistence towards Moscow. But in the usual reassuring last paragraph, Mr. Sullivan, rearing himself ruggedly into pontifical mood, asserts his faith in the integrity of the People and the Courts who before long, he feels, will rise in their might and check this dastardly plot before it is too late.

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What is, perhaps, the most aggravating feature of Mr. Sullivan's dicta is not the aura of the Union League Club in late afternoon, nor the pomposity of his crystalized oratory, but the insistence that these New Dealers are embarking on adventures whose consequence they neither guess nor consider, that these striplings are being carried away by the Fun of It All with no though of the implications of their wild brainstorms, beyond attaining the goal of oppressive collectivism. While it is perfectly true that Washington could do very well with a dozen economists above the stature of Messrs. Warren and Pearson, and could tap the expertise resources of the country with more discretion than it has shown so far, it is not true, nevertheless, that those of the Left Wing are either blind to the possibilities of their measures, or, on the other hand, filled with the shining vision of the Kremlin as God's beacon in a benighted world. Henry Wallace's article in the Sunday Times revealed a keen, practical man quite cognizant of the alternatives before the nation, in their long-run and short-run aspects, and alive as much to the dangers of fascism as to the necessity for national discipline. Where Sullivan in a panic indicates that the planning of our export agricultural problem may result in the shifting of the economic factors away from some regions to others, Secretary Wallace accepts this situation and discusses cooly the causes, the inevitability, and the price--material and spiritual--of the dislocations involved.

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There is no necessity to swell here the already monumental literature on the subtle antithesis between the academic and the "worldly" mind. But it may be worthwhile to recall that this difference does exist, and that it is of primary importance in estimating the validity of the objections to the N.R.A. new being borne by every little zophyr which wanders too close to the cloistered universities of the land. The outstanding facts, so often voiced, so rarely comprehended, of our period are that the growing rigidities, of our economic structure and the psychology which is at once its cause and effect have made the unhampered self-adjustment of that system impossible, and that this necessitates a series of grim, not certainly successful, attempts at the control of this structure. In this process of experimentation, more failures than victories would not be surprising, and it is sure that the consumer as such is in for a time of hard sledding. These facts are trite, but they are facts, nonetheless, and known for that by those who, in Washington and elsewhere feel the pressure of events more strongly than the weight of precedent. That six Harvard instructors recognized it as well, and spoke their minds in a public letter to the president, is a hopeful sign, and a particularly welcome antidote to the bast of the Seven Sages from their crack in the rock of Sound Money. CASTOR.