"Flying Rattlesnakes"

Premier Reijiro Wakatsuki smothered last week the loud jingoist demands of his Minister of Marine (TIME, Nov. 8). As a result of compromise, the Navy's demand for an additional budgetary outlay of 122,400,000 yen ($60,000,000) was clipped, and a five-year building program substituted during which the following ships will glide down the ways: four 10,000-ton cruisers; sixteen 1,700-ton destroyers, one 2,000-ton submarine; four 1,700-ton submarines; and three river gunboats.

This partial curtailment of the navy's building plans was made largely in the interest of Japan's annually more formidable air program.

While the development of military and naval aircraft is being proceeded with in secret, no less than 11,200,000 yen ($5,600,000) was included in the budget last week for the purpose of subsidizing and developing commercial air routes alone.

Hearst Editor Brisbane, ever as quick to deplore the lack of U. S. air preparedness as he is to laud his political hero, Calvin Coolidge, deftly interwove these two fetishes into a neat parable last week:

"President Coolidge has been invited to California. He ought to accept and he should visit this Mojave desert. On a hillside, below a big rock, he would see a complicated, ingenious bulwark of small branches, each one carrying thorns, protecting the hole of the desert pack rat.

"It's a thoroughly American rat, no relation to the black and brown rats of Europe. It fears rattlesnakes, gopher snakes and ground owls. It has never seen one-- otherwise it would not be alive.

"But it knows they exist, and might come at any time, sliding down the hole, bringing death.

"So the desert rat prepares and does his little best, with thorns and cactus. If he were President of the United States, he would build flying machines and make this nation independent of the flying rattlesnakes of Europe and Asia."

In his column on the day previous Mr. Brisbane had declared: "We are as unfit as Haiti to fight a modern nation." On six consecutive days, Mr. Brisbane, whose mass-public does not resent repetition of ideas, repeated the alarm.