Judge — May 30, 1931 — page 15: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

Can Politics Be Liberal ? overson At Rercie of Mary- G land is still running after the Democratic nomination. aspir- ing to be Al the Second. Recently he gave a radio address on what he called Politics.” He dito apply the term liberalism to the remedies he Liberalism in mnan- has to propose for such diverse woes as prohibition, the tariff, overproduction, unemployment. ind racketeering. still be that spirit made in the inn who has very one who eves man is a living of God, and human institutions ind in the inherent soundness of de y and the inherent strength of the common man, eve should approach his public cal duties girded with th liberalism, Its function is to point to a better world and lead the way. faith in moer: such on and politi- armor of true No truly liberal mind can deny this isan ideal, But “liberalism in’ poli actually a Herbert Bayard Swope said the other day that we are in the midst a struggle between liberalism and “the first bein of mind and the second a state of politics.” To go on from that, it is most a truism that our liberals lack political technique and sive politic eral ties” is contradictory phrase. progressivism a state our progres- ans are not genuinely lih- Most of the leaders of the pre ssives are dry. How can you be both dry and liberal? Most of them still cling to the outworn doctrines of the 1 with the virtues of economic obsessed ompetition, Lib- eralism demands the large-scale busi- ness operation that is forbidden by the very laws which the prog: invoke. On the other hand, the good old Herald Tribune, New York, makes gallant attempt to show that libe ism is actually After correctly ing that liberalism co es toleran nd the love of fre it inveighs against those liberals who favor “foreign entanglements,” essives conservative. JUDGE disarmaments and tariff reduction; it aceuses liberals of having “more sym- pathy with the criminal than with the object of criminal attack,” and it seems to imply that you can't be a lib- eral unless you hold out for that “fun damental liberty” which under the label of individualism has made chios beralism pect wiich seems to be completely forgotten.” The truth is that both reactionaries and progressives are equally sinners against-the name of liberalism. This will always be so when an intellectual concept is carried over into the unreal world of politics. The low state of the “liberal party” in England is an example. ‘The essential conservatism of the “radical” and “socialist wv ernments in Europe is another. ‘The place to look for liberalism is never in the halls of legislation and adminis- tration, but in the temples of educa- tion, in the editorial rooms, at the di- rectors’ table, in the councils of labor, around the cracker barrel, at the fire- de—wherever there is being form the deep public opinion which in the long curve of time will finally detee- mine the acts of the little men who make the little laws. of our economic system. thus has a conservative Worried Children Accivests killed 18,000 Americ: children last year. Most of these were automobile cidents. Grown- ups say children are careless, impul- sive, have to learn to look out for themselves. Truc, no doubt. But here's an astonishing fact revealed in a survey by Dr. Herbert J. Stack. A large part of the accidents to children are the result of worry. Interviewing children who have been injured by cars, he learned that at many of them had been going along in a daze of worry about affairs at home or at school or about some injustice that they thought had been done to them. The same thing has been heard from children injured in factories. Pos- sibly there is some exaggeration here. Children are troubles prone : and to agine injustice That is, things that seem big to them trivial to us. But even so, isn't their fault that the adult w is so messed up that it gets them baf- fled then every often hits them with one of its new- fangled mac seem and_ terrified nes, maiming or killing We have to have the machines in the name of progress. But in the name of decency, do we have to have a social order that piles a load of worry on the shoulders of childrer Grown-ups are entirely too mucho cupied with their own petty concerns. They do not give proper heed to the far more important job of making childhood carefree. them. More Laws to Break Wies the duly constituted au- thority of ‘the people has spoken, duty requires the citizen to observe and public officers t the I: Give you one wrote th Right. It’s Coolidge’s Daily Dozings. Well, the New York L passed 1,120 new laws. this Governor Roosevelt. says that about 800 more than necessary, He vetoed 350, The other 450 might have been taken care of by simple enforce who Cal guess from slature year. was amendments of general laws already on the books, And, furthermore, the » of the Legislature was taken up with some 3,200 bills that were intro- duced and not passed. “I wish,” says the Governor, “that the voters would make polite suggestions to their As- semblymen and to their Senators that they will give them a good conduct mark in proportion to the smallness of the number of bills that they intro- duce.” How about giving the plain citizen a good conduct mark in proportion to the number of damfool laws that he openly and deliberately defies? What we really need, as has been said be- fore, is more “temperate lawlessnes RILW, comicbooks.com