Vagabond Editorials

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It was one of the latter who stepped proudly up the street, and was pointed out by one man to another. "That guy" said the one, "is worth twenty million dollars'" "Wrong," said the second. "I'm NOT wrong," said the first; "I happen to know beyond a doubt that he has profited so much during the depression that he is worth twenty millions." "You mean he HAS twenty millions," said his friend; "he. isn't Y9!th a dime.".

The sweetest piece ", ;-", irr"t t ", come to my desk in a year, arrived the other day from a country lumber dealer. He sent in a check for two dollars. "I should have sent this sooner," he said, "but I have been waiting for some sure sign that the depression was over. I got that sign the first time this morning. I was driving along a country road and a rabbit ran across the road ahead of my fivver AND THERE WAS NO-ONE AFTER IT.'' That's one for the book.

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I know a man who used to boast-during the boom days of. L928 and 1929-that he started business on a shoestring' Now he's using it to hold up his pants.

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The owner of the great, big, shiny automobile didn't look so very happy although his friend was volubly admiring the car. "That baby will pass anything on the road. won't it?" asked the friend. "With one exception," replied the owner. "What's that?" "It won't pass a gasoline station," said the owner, sadly. *t* d.**

Sometimes the advertisement is much better than the article advertised. A man wrote a book, and then hired an ad man to write some magazine advertisements for the book. They were good ads, and the book sold freely. Then came a letter from a book buyer. He wrote: "I read your ads, I bought a book, and I have read it; but why in Hell didn't you hire the man that wrote the ads, to write the book?"

"A reformer", an old friend of mine used to say, "is a pestiferous individual who utterly refuses to allow the depraved to go to Hell in Peace." **<tr

Arthur W. Cutten, writing in The Saturday Evening Post, gives the Federal Farm Board the worst skinning I've heard of since Bob Ingersoll jumped on preachers. He tells the things that any messenger boy in a grain office would know that no-one on the Farm Board appears to have known. One of the small matters the Farm Board overlooked is that we have another crop each year. Just a small item of over-sight.

Since the Farm Board has been engaged in its amateurish efiort to stabilize prices, wheat has gone to all-time low levels; and their gamble already shows a loss of about $,+00,000,000 and the end not in sight. They pay about $3,000,000 a month for storage alone. And this famous grain speculator, Cutten, thinks one professional opinion on the Board might have saved all that. Even a professional grain office-boy could have helped a lot. *** t*{<

They can't hang over the office of the Federal Farm Board the sign I saw recently over a lot filled with secondhand automobiles-"I]sed But Not Abused."

Truly business, ril." "l nlrr.] ""u riches, is divided into two parts: to HAVE and to HOLD.

"FIow can we make 1933 a great building year?" reads a cornmunication I received the other day from one of my retail lumber friends. I'll have to give the famous answer that the blase old book-maker at the race track gave a lumber friend of mine years ago when the latter asked him which horse was going to win. He said-"My friend, that's all I'd ever want to know." *rB*

Wouldn't I be the h"ppy man if I could utter just the barest shadow of a thought that might point the way to such a miracle? I can give the prescription, all right. The prescription i5-"fly loosening up financial credit all the way along the line from the fundamental source of finance to the ultimate constuner everywhere." THAT'S the prescription, all right. But where and how can we get it filled?

They tell of the Scotchman who was seen wanderirrg around town staring into all the windows and reading the business signs, and who, when asked what his search was for, said he was looking for a cut-price postofEce. A lot of us are.

Congress raised trr" prl"" l, o*o*" stamps to increase revenue. And by so doing very speedily DECREASED

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