General Johnson has very aptly stated the difficulties of the National Recovery Administration in his twelve points; he does not, however, do any more than state them. It needs no General Johnson to tell us that shortening hours and raising wages are not the same thing as "lightening the employer's burden," and yet these were the characteristic demands of the two large groups represented at his conference. The meeting, as many observers have pointed out, served a real political purpose; it brought together all those who were dissatisfied with the NRA, heard all their pleas, and then assured them that these were real difficulties, and that the Administration had its finger firmly upon them.

Mr. Norman Thomas is not alone in insisting that the present administration has undertaken a task whose implications it does not seem to grasp. After almost a year spent in getting cards by the New Deal, the nation has a right to ask the administration's answer to a few rather fundamental questions. What does the "self-government" of industry mean, and how does it differ from the self-government which preceded Mr. Roosevelt's inauguration? How does it square with Senator Wagner's "Industrial democracy"? What does "industrial democracy" mean if we are to have no regular democratic organization of labor, and not even the "privilege" of collective bargaining? Who will police the codes? What are the sanctions for a government control of production and distribution that is not straight government ownership? How does the government propose to establish such a control without its corollary of responsibility?

It is a little uncomfortable to reflect that we do not know the Administration's answer to any of these questions. We have only hints, fragmentary, and contradicting suggestions of the answer which the Administration will finally give to each of them. And we are not assisted in our task by reference to the motivating political philosophy of Mr. Roosevelt. So far as that has been disclosed to us, it is a little of Mr. John Dewey's debauched pragmatism, a little Jeffersonian democracy, a little talk of the integrated state which the suspicious might call Fascism, and a dash of Tammany Martini. The idea that Mr. Daniel Roper and Mr. Roxford G. Tugwell could agree on any fundamental policy of agricultural adjustment is only exceeded in obscurity by the question as to which of them has more influence on the administration's agricultural program.

Mr. Harold Laski has pointed out that the chief significance of Mr. Roosevelt's administration is that it represents the first great attempt to achieve fundamental social reform with parliamentary methods. Since Mr. Harold Laski has already said that fundamental social reform could not be accomplished by parliamentary methods, because "fundamental social reform" means public ownership, he obviously regards the attempt as part of the pathology of political science. After one year of churning and fuming, and after Mr. Johnson's conference, the measurable results are only these, that the administration has built up a large and unsanctioned machinery for the control of industry, that it must either abandon the machinery, or resort, as Mr. Johnson threatens, to the fascist (or the communist) dictatorship that can sanction it. POLLUX