WITH the echoes of presidential campaigning dying away in the distance, and the screaming of impassioned politicians now scarcely audible, the time is ripe for an honestly dispassionate analysis of Mr. Roosevelt's administration. Before the election any writing which so much as sniffed at political questions was rudely branded either wholly Democratic or purely Republican. Any work of scholarship which dared to peek around a political corner was immediately seized, and the blight of partisanship was forever stamped upon its cover. Republican voters road Republican pamphlets, and convinced Democrats smiled disdainfully at Herbert Hoover's while fetching a dollar for Secretary Wallace's "latest". Into this potpourri of citizens, now that the party quarantine has been lifted, the Editors of the London "Economist" have dropped their appraisal of The New Deal, an appraisal which will both satisfy and dissatisfy Republicans and Democrats alike.

Viewed from the vantage point of three thousand miles, away from the guns and targets of local politics, "The New Deal", as written by these London editors, is doubtless a highly authoritative and unbiased judgment of the last four years of American history. Perhaps the most convincing phase of their treatment is the plentiful supply of factual material and indices. Information which we have long been wanting to see assembled together, and for which we should have had to scurry all over the country, has been made an integral part of the Administration analysis.

It is impossible to give an adequate idea of the Editors' conclusions on all New Deal aspects, but a few very interesting observations really deserve to be mentioned. One of these highly significant items is the question of the national debt. Hot-headed conservatives who cannot sleep over the "preposterous" and "dangerous" debt of the United States should find a mild form of Ovaltine in the fact that our per capita debt is considerably less than half that of the British. Another illuminating observation is the discovery of the high cost of rent necessary to maintain the new houses in the Administration's "slum clearance" program. As much as $7 per month per room with the government carrying almost half of the construction cost is required to give the city-dweller minimum comfort according to the American standard of living.

In general, it is apparent that the Editors of the "Economist" have very definite conclusions as to the successes of Roosevelt's three prime objectives: Relief, Recovery, and Reform. They give him great credit for his relief program in the face of yapping critics and inevitable difficulties; they grant him little claim to recovery, and perhaps, in some fields a measure of retarding influence; and to his record on reform they give their moderate approval of everything except the N.R.A. "The New Deal" indeed deserves to be read by every person who finds his own ideas of the Roosevelt Administration in a more or less nebulous state. It renders a judgment which cannot lightly be cast aside.