"Back to the Constitution"

Most of the 1.300 Republicans who packed into Chicago's Hamilton Club one afternoon last week to hear Indiana's James Eli Watson orate for two and one-half hours, thought they were listening to the first gun of a G.O.P. Midwest campaign against President Roosevelt. A few of them even fancied they were witnessing the start of a drive by the long-legged, large-paunched. small-eyed ex-Senator for the party's 1936 Presidential nomination.

What they were all treated to was an oldfashioned, rip-snorting stump speech by an Old Guardsman whose battle-cry was: ''Back to the Constitution!"

"Jim" Watson flayed President Roosevelt for abandoning the gold standard, for trifling with the currency, for scaring off private credit, for unleashing a Blue Eagle "boycott," for concealing Budget deficits by "double bookkeeping." Cried he:

"Roosevelt, in a dozen speeches, said no responsible government would break a covenant in respect to meeting its obligations in gold. Yet that is just what he did do. The answer to this charge of inconsistency is that 'he is trying to do something.' (Laughter) . . . The President has said this whole plan is an experiment; that if it does not succeed he will know it sooner than anybody else and then will try something else; that he intends to keep on trying this, that or the other policy just as long as there is any thing left to try. . . .

"The wealth of the country cannot be wholly redistributed by taxation processes. . . . We are opposed to regimenting every young man entering active life, putting him in a straitjacket, giving him an opportunity to be so much and no more. Men cannot be thus leveled without handicapping individual initiative.

"The mere fact that a world-wide depression has upset the whole earth, changed all financial, commercial and economic conditions, and produced governmental revolutions everywhere -- that fact, stern and forbidding as it is, should not be permitted to drive us away from those basic realities that underlie our Government, the operation of which is responsible for the marvelous growth of this republic and that still must constitute the beacon light to lead us on to greater heights of industry, prosperity and liberty. ... I believe the Republican Party should reaffirm its determination to stand by the Constitution!"

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