Mr. Barton

"I was against the Eighteenth Amendment and the Volstead Act. I was also against the Mann Act. Not because I want to get drunk or pay the carfare of a lady from one State to another, but because our government was founded on the principle that the central authority should not act except where the States cannot. I think it was a very unwise departure for the national government to attempt to regulate personal conduct. .

"As long as we've got prohibition, I'd like to give it long enough to work itself out. ... If we keep it 100 years and the other nations stay wet, we'll either own them or they will be working for us. ...

"Every day some one of my friends announces that he has gone on the wagon. There will always be a certain percentage of drinkers, but their kidneys will carry them off.

"Anyway, I'm against any revision of the thing via emotion. The Eighteenth Amendment was swept in by emotion. Governor Smith wants to get a change by emotion, inspired by his magnetic personality and popular appeal. I'd much rather trust the question to a mind like Hoover's, that will get the facts."

This and much more Adman Bruce Barton (The "Nobody Knows" Series) said in an interview printed last week by the New York Telegram. Theoretically, he was answering a similar interview with Publisher H. L. Mencken, whom he good-naturedly called "an actor . . . bad influence on young people ... a grand court jester ... a sad voice singing 'Sweet Adeline' in the speakeasies." Pungent paragraphs from Mr. Barton's interview follow:

"I'm a Protestant, but I think the Methodists ought to move out of Washington and the Catholics ought to keep out.

"Both Herbert Hoover and Governor Smith have fine wives.

"The biggest question of the next four years is not agriculture or Prohibition, but foreign affairs.

"The man who was most right about the last War was Eugene Debs. He said that all we got out of it was influenza and the income tax."

Paradoxical for an advertising agent whose business it is to make all things interesting was Mr. Barton's approving quotation from Ralph Waldo Emerson: "History will continually grow less interesting."