Prophets & Physicians

Long ago President Hoover and his Cabinet ceased optimistic predictions of an early return of prosperity. The President, after setting May for the end of the business slump, saw his forecasts go all awry. Even Secretary of Labor James John Davis, the most irrepressibly cheery prophet, has grown silent on the economic future. Democratic delay on the tariff bill was recurrently cited by Republicans as the reason for unsettled business. They prophesied a quick upturn as soon as that measure was out of the way. The new tariff became law June 17. But July, according fo figures given out by members of the Administration last week, failed to show any improvement.

U. S. industrial employment last month, recording to the Department of Labor, declined 2.6% below that of June. Workers' earnings dropped off 7.1% in the same period. Employment for July 1929 was 98.2%; for July 1930, 81.6%. The building trades were still seriously subnormal. Surplus labor was almost everywhere available. Many a factory was closed or closing. In New York City last week a new free municipal employment agency was stormed by 2,000 jobless, who found less than 100 jobs to be doled out.

Imports and exports, fair barometer of business, fell to a five-year low in July, according to the Department of Commerce. In July last year the U. S. shipped out goods worth $402,000,000; this year, $269,000,000. Imports likewise fell off $133,000,000 for the same month this year and last. The Department of Commerce explained the declines as due to world-wide economic depression. Critics of the Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act recalled their predictions that the high rates of that measure would have no immediate and severe effect upon U. S. foreign trade.

Because economics control politics, the Republican National Committee, in the person of its new Executive Director Robert Henry Lucas, last week set up beside the Administration's bad news the framework of the party's campaign defense, to wit: things will be much worse if the Democrats win the Congressional election in November. Declared Director Lucas in his first broadside:

"When a man gets a serious illness, he doesn't call in a quack. He puts his faith in the old family physician. . . . The country is facing a crisis.

"We are in the midst of a temporary but serious depression. . . . Elect a Democratic Congress in 1930 and this country will not see normal business again for some years.

". . . The Democratic strategists confer and consult and issue statements, all the while fearing an improvement in business before the election."

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