Evening Post. FRIDAY, MAY 31, 1935. PATCHING THE HOLES

Evening Post, Volume CXIX, Issue 127, 31 May 1935, Page 8

Evening Post. FRIDAY, MAY 31, 1935. PATCHING THE HOLES

| "Some legal enactment"—not yet defined—is President Roosevelt's reply to the wrecking by the Supreme Court of the N.R.A. law. In other words, the legislators may find some way of rewriting the Acts so that they will pass the Courts, or at any rate so that they will hold the fort for, the time being. - After all, the legislation now declared bad did hold the fort for a long time; and some of the laws that, by parallel reasoning, appear to be bad,, may yet stop a gap until the Administration can establish a new and sounder legal position. At best, however, this is a patching, job. It seems to have given occasion for the recall of that picturesque personality General Johnson. One of the General's strong points is that the criticism of one set of his opponents tends to cancel the criticism of another set of his opponents; no one can call him an extremist after his attack on Senator, Long and Father Coughlin, and criticism that he has met in employer circles certainly does not establish him as a reactionary. No one personality has been more identified with N.R.A. than that of the General, and his recall suggests that,, in a crisis, when the whole structure is in danger, he is still regarded as "a daring pilot in extremity" and as representing in himself a fair balance of the good points as well as the bad points of N.R.A. If President Roosevelt wished to advertise to 120 million people that N.R.A. will not be lost without an effort at salvage, he could not have advertised better than by recalling General Johnson—a figure whose fame is nation-wide and in? deed world-wide, and rests upon his vehemence as much as on his virtues.*

While valuing voluntary compliance by employers and business with the wrecked laws and codes and ordinances, President Roosevelt points out the obvious fact that voluntary compliance, would not "assure a maximum of observance." Even a minimum of non-observance would probably break down voluntary compliance, precipitating strike warfare. Two ways of meeting the situation are suggested in the cabled news: (1) patching up* the legal position, which the President appears to endorse; (2) "direct Government competition with private industry in the labour market." It is hard to imaginethat the President will adopt the latter plan. How can it possibly succeed? For weeks he fOught Congress on the question of payment of relief workers, and, though he conceded some ground, succeeded in keeping down the payment to what is regarded as a subsistence level. The attempt of sections of Congress to pay standard rates on relief was resisted on the usual grounds—that it is economically impossible (also undesirable) to meet the cost, especially as the standardisation of payment would cause relief work to be preferred and would tend to make it _ universal. When, therefore, "Liberals in Congress" evolve a scheme for scrapping the subsistence wage and substituting the prevailing wage standard, they are asking the Government to do something that is beyond, its ' powers, unless the Liberals in Congress have discovered some untouched area of taxation that has no political defences and which will not dry up under new levies. Although Government spending has already reached figures that tax the arithmetician, it is impossible to -'en* visage any scheme of relief, works, or any scheme of .relief works plus public works, that could maintain wage and hour standards by direct competition with private enterprise. This proposal "is no remedy, but is an indication of the panic point reached by some legislators. No such panic sign is given by the Administration, nor yet by Congress as a whole. But one of the most.important questions calling for an answer *is how Congress will face the new position created by the Supreme Court. Up to that point, the weakest feature of Congress had been the voting on the issue of fiat money tc^cash the veterans' bonus—■ a step that was prevented only by a few votes in one Chamber (the Senate) and' then only after the President's veto and special appeal. A Congress with a temper like that on the inflation question does not seem .to be. {he kind p_f C_ongress:to

back up the President in his effort to put on the brakes. But now a great blow has been delivered by the Courts to the laws, and the lawmakers are compelled to take slock of a fresh situation. Will they emerge firmer, or weaker, on the inflation issues? To some it may seem that, if the Constitution forbids such adjustment measures as fixing conditions of labour in cities and regulating planting and production on farms, and if at the same time the Constitution does not forbid manipulating the dollar and overspending—"why, then, let us inflate and try to spend our way out of it!" That extreme of inflation has hitherto been fought even by an inflationist Administration. But if an inflationary moral is drawn from the constitutionality of the gold clause and the unconstitutionality of the regulatory legislation, President Roosevelt as a moderate will have a new factor to fight—one which may undermine his moderation. The trend of Court judgments, the idea of voluntary compliance with high wages and low hours, the fantastic project of State competition with private enterprise, a removal of checks on farm production—each and all could be turned into ammunition by inflation propagandists.