Evening Post. WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 1934. MR. HOOVER BREAKS SILENCE

Evening Post, Volume CXVIII, Issue 57, 5 September 1934, Page 8

Evening Post. WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 1934. MR. HOOVER BREAKS SILENCE

' Not long after Britain under Gladstone's leadership had begun to think seriously of Home Rule for Ireland, a distinguished Unionist, probably A. V. Dicey, attacked it on what he regarded as the unanswerable grounds "of principle. But John Morley likened the position of the nation to that of a traveller expecting advice on the crossing of a swollen ford but compelled to listen to the lecture of some learned professor on the abstract dynamics of a particle moving in a vacuum. Mr. Herbert Hoover's attack on the Roosevelt Administration as reported from Philadelphia today seems to have no closer relation to practical politics than the lecture of that learned professor. The burden of his song in the current issue of the "Saturday Evening Post" appears to be that "the people of the United States are faced with the issue of human liberty." The words recall two of the sayings of a greater President than Hoover or either of the Roosevells, of the greatest of them

all, indeed, unless Washington ought

to be excepted. "The world," said Lincoln, "is badly in need of a good definition of liberty." He also said that "it is not best to swap horses while crossing the river." In spite of all the marvellous scientific discoveries .of which we are reminded today by Sir James Jeans's presidential address to the British Association, the world is just as badly in need of a good definition of liberty as it ever was, and Mr. Hoover appears to have declared it to be the issue without explaining what it means. And his abstract devotion to something that he does not define is proclaimed under conditions which remove his advice even further from practice than that of Morley's professor, for the nation that he advises has not been balked by the dangers of the ford but is already half-way across.

The abstractness of Mr. Hoover's treatment is emphasised by two other points. It is only "inferentially" that he condemns the policies of the Roosevelt Administration as "will-o'-the-wisps." So lofty is his standpoint, so far up in the clouds, as his critics will naturally say, that though he probably knows that there is a President in office, he is unable to say who it is.

Tho article makes no mention by namo of President Roosevelt, but includes' a critical digest of the powers granted President Roosevelt, and assails tho "un-American" attitude of Congress in granting these powers.

What Mr. Hoover considers to be gained by this anonymity we are quite unable to see. If he had been speaking from the platform one could understand it, for the name of Roosevelt might set any American crowd cheering in the wrong direction, just as a British Unionist speaker used to find that Gladstone's name did in the days to which we have referred. Mr. Hoover lias at any rate had his harmless little affectation or his very mild liltle joke, has added thereby to the dullness of his article, and has supplied one more proof that, solid as his merits are, the personal touch is not one of his strong points. And despite his laboured impersonality he lets the cat out of the bag when he speaks of what Congress has done for an unnamed President by its "un-American" procedure.

A much more serious weakness of the article is, however, the personal insignificance of the writer since his retirement from office. We are told that it is "his first discussion of political questions since he left the White House." It is impossible to imagine a Gladstone or a Disraeli, an Asquith or a Lloyd George keeping silence for eighteen months after leaving office and then breaking, it with a newspaper or a magazine article. Yet, though the eclipse of Mr. Hoover has been darkened by his lack of any popular gifts, its completeness is merely an exaggeration of what to a large extent is a normal weakness of his country's politics.

The American party system, has no place for a Leader of the Opposition, says Mr. D. W. Brogan in his article on "The President and Politics" in the July "Fortnightly Review." A defeated Presidential candidate fades out. Bryan and Theodore Roosevelt and, to a less degree, Mr. Al Smith, are partial exceptions to this rule, but Mr. Hoover is not. Tho fiction that he would be the candidate in 1936 has lost whatever shreds of plausibility it ever had, and with that loss has gone the last semblance of party unity. Efforts were made to give the party a progressive tone by nominating a western, chairman, but the Old Guard was strong enough to prevent that, and the Republicans have for a chief of the party headquarters Mr. H. P. Fletcher, a former ambassador who has so far avoided taking sides that his selection can be represented as a victory for the conservatives and yet not a defeat for tho progressives. Tho Committee has also gone in for progressive words; the party will be "liberal progressive," but will die in the ditch in defence of "individual initiative" (Mr. Hoover's slogan was "rugged individualism," so the progress is not startling). That something more drastic will be required to put the party on its feet is not a secret hidden from the move astute among the Republican leaders.

Mr. Brogan adds that, as the result of two generations of success, the Republican Party is suffering from "fatty "degeneration of the head," and finds it difficult to abandon "the habits of meaningless common-place which did so well for so long." Neither in substance nor in form does Mr. Hoover's gospel appear to

have carried the matter any further than the "rugged individualism" of his previous slogan or the "individual initiative" of the Republican Committee. And there was much more "kick" in the manifesto issued by Mr. Fletcher on behalf of the party a few weeks after Mr. Brogan's article was written than in Mr. Hoover's contribution to the "Saturday Evening Post." Mr. Fletcher was not afraid to mention the name of Roosevelt along with those of such other tyrants as King John and Mussolini and Hitler. He denounced the subordination of American rights and property to "a vast maze of theorising, meddling, directing, spending, lending, and borrowing agencies," and the extravagance and profligacy that resulted.

But Mr. Fletcher appears to have stopped short of a charge of corruption, and perhaps with good reason.

If Republican disunion is one great asset of the President, says Mr. Brogan, Republican disreputability is another. At every critical moment of the past year some new scandal has blown up,' and the victims have been usually associated with the opposite party.

. .' . And the American people is still too sore to, forget it. Even if it were ready to forget, new cats are constantly being let (or dragged) out of the bag—and the Insull trial is still to come!

As Mr. Brogan says, it is not greater wickedness but better opportunities that made the Republicans more corrupt. But the corruption was there, and the memory of it presents another obstacle to Mr. Hoover's not very inspiring attempt to rouse the nation on behalf of "the primary liberties of man."