The New York Legislature has grappled with the Communist menace. In the midst of the intellectual stagnation and physical exhaustion that usually accompanies the closing hours of a legislative session or a six day bike race, the New York solons passed a bill banning radicals from state office. The bill defines communism as "the doctrine which advocates the destruction of the state by force and violence and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat or the advocation of the suppression of free speech."

Logically a person believing in the overthrow of the government by violence should not be permitted to participate in the management of that government. Communists who admit that validity of this principle would apply it to Fascists; Fascists would apply it to Communists; most people would apply it to both. But practical people would oppose the action of the legislature because they realize that the overthrow of American capitalism would probably result from something a trifle more serious than the appointment of a communist to the key position of confidential examiner in the office of the Borough President of Manhattan.

An indication of the true import of this bill is its parturition in the patriotic breast of Senator McNaboe, whose record includes vigorous support of the New York Teachers' Oath Law and an oft repeated demand for an investigation of subversive activities on the Cornell campus. It is discouraging that a legislature which has just enacted a constructive program of social reform should have taken so seriously the emotional fulminations of Senator McNaboe, that it passed a bill which would bar from teaching posts some idealistic parlor pinks whose sole crime is the possession of a confused and incoherent social consciousness.