Ole Doc Tugwell, speaking to the American Society of Newspaper Editors in Washington, gave as smooth a sales talk on behalf of the New Deal Cure-All as was ever given by an old time medicine man from the tall of a spring wagon.

It was a masterpiece of verbal tight-rope walking. Criticism of the New Deal from conservative newspapers has been, for the most part, stupid and banal, taking the line that "traditional American ideals" are in danger. The doctor professed to take this as a legitimate danger; he indicated that he abhorred it, too, only--the danger was the other way around. That is to say, the real American ideals antedate the ideals of those who find their ideals endangered by the New Deal. It is confusing, of course. It can be made more delightfully confusing by saying that the democracy that Roosevelt democracy threatens was in its turn a threat to democracy.

More Tugwell definitions: free speech and freedom of the press are conditions wherein every group can find expression. In other words, a free press is not free to close its columns to anything, even to denials of freedom. Chesterton never did anything better. One is reminded of his statement that a free-thinker is the most unfree thinker in the world, because he is not free to think seriously of the tiniest miracle.

Tugwell has been wasting his time in the class-room. He is a born political orator. The genuine objections to the New Deal he completely ignored, exactly as they have been ignored by the opposition press, which has been concentrating on the construction of some of the most elaborate and ridiculous straw men ever built. The doctor solemnly applied the match to these straw men, never for a moment indicating what his innate good sense assured him: that he knew the straw was flimsy and cheap and smelly with age.