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I tot NAILS BRADS

Tacks Staples

E.Z OPEN SAFETY KEGS

Protect hands and eyes I

Abolish unnecessary risks of old method

Let me live out my years in heat of blood, Let me die drunken with the dreamer's wine; Let me not see this soul house built of mud

Go toppling to the dust, a broken shrine. Let me go quickly, like a candle light Snuffed out just at the hey-day of its glow; Give me high noon, and let it then be night; Thus would I go.

And grant that when I face the grisly thing, My song may echo down the great perhaps; Let me be as a tune-swept fiddle string, That feels the master melody-and snaps.

*:B*

I've fo,rgotten, I'm ashamed to say, who wrote the above. But isn't it a grand statement of how the average thinking man feels about that great final mystery? So many times in the past few years I have seen good men and true, good friends whom I loved, "Go toppling to the dust-a broken shrine," and f can think of nothing more pitiful. .,Give me high noon, and let it then be night." That's my song, too. lc lr {<

I've been reading of a lot of the crack-pot schemes of legislation that are being offered our law-making bodies the country over. Truly, the political drug store,is overloaded with panaceas. Not since the starry flag of freedom was first unfurled over this federation of states has there ever been a time when such a multitude of strange nostrums and isms have been thrust upon the public gaze, all of them aiming in some peculiar fashion to usher in the millennium. As I read the lists and their contents I seriously ponder and wonder whether or not this land of the free and the home of the brave has not become in some manner mentally emasculated. ***

Financial and economic follies, built so.lely on desire to create something out of thin air, beyond the reach of reason and in no wise amenable to the laws of logic, have become as common as pig tracks around an East Texas schoolhouse. Political nostrums as dangerous as a bottle of nitroglycerine in the hands of a baby, abound. Let us kneel and pray that there may be found in our various law-making bodies sufficient men of intelligence and courage and patriotism to successfully take up the gage of battle against the tides of ignorance and crackpotism. Is it any wonder that people who possess property or money pull ever deeper into their holes, frightened at such wantonness?

**t<

No argument is necessary to prove how scared money owners are. All the voices now crying aloud out of Washington testify to the fact of the money-jam. To break that jam is now the chief effort of all the powers of the federal administration, since it is admittedly the idleness of our private money that continues the idleness of our workers. But a few figures are very illuminating, like the following: Take the relationship between our national bank deposits and loans outstanding, as an amazing evidence of what is going on. In 1933 bank deposits totaled 37 billions of dollars, and loans outstanding 22 billions. In 1934 deposits had grown to 41 billions, and loans had slumped to 2l billions. See the trend? In 1935 deposits had reached 45 billions, and loans were then just 20 billions. , People were sticking their money away in banks, and the percentage of it that was loaned to individuals and private business was declining steadily. Now we have 1936. We find deposits have reached 51 billions, and loans are still just 20 billions. In 1937 deposits are 53 billions, and loans have grown a little, are now 22 billions, but small indeed in comparison with the idle money. In 1938 deposits are 52 billions, and loans have shrunk to 21 billions, as the new depression set in.

***

Today the proportions are no better although I have not the last minute figures at hand. Deposits, kind friends, are back to where they were before the depression. But instead of these billions being out working in all the channels of trade and of industry, they are frozen harder than the North Pole in the shape of cash on hand and government bonds in the bank vaults. And either cash or bonds might as well not exist as far as enervating and financing new business or putting people to work, are concerned.

The idle cash and idle bonds in the bank vaults today would employ every unemployed person in this country if invested in active business.

Don't get the idea .n"l ,rli" l" " "riti"i.m of those who

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