"Brave Words"

So much magic is packed into the syllables of Franklin Delano Roosevelt that foreign comment on the President's messages to Congress (see p. 14) mainly took the form of efforts to make local use of what he said rather than to appraise its worth:

Britain. Because that canny Scot, James Ramsay MacDonald will rush into no experiments, to the infinite distress of Britain's Hearstian press peers, they used the President's speech as a whip to make the Prime Minister giddap.

"What a lesson President Roosevelt, the hero of a nation, teaches the rulers of this country!" cried Canadian-born Baron Beaverbrook's London Daily Express. "President Roosevelt goes to war against the slump with warlike daring and wartime finance. His budget is in the Armageddon of 1918 class; it reminds you of Russia's Five-Year Plan. . . ."

"The imagination boggles at the extent of the deficit now contemplated," chimed in Viscount Rothermere's Daily Mail. "The whole Roosevelt program," summed up Baron Camrose's Daily Telegraph;, "is a gallant defiance of orthodoxy."

Tory papers like the Morning Post held up the President's budget as an awful, ipso facto warning that the U. S. is headed for uncontrolled inflation. "His words are brave words," said the Liberal News Chronicle, "but can America, with its traditions of highly individualistic, not to say lawless, private enterprise in industry, and its great lack (in comparison with this country) of trained professional civil servants, be induced to accept the degree of state control over the social and economic structure which President Roosevelt clearly proposes?"

Reflecting the annoyance of His Majesty's Government that President Roosevelt after wrecking the London Conference on the issue of stabilization, should have taken a holier-than-thou attitude on that issue last week, the London Times alluded icily to "his curious reference to difficulties which prevent other nations from entering into stabilization discussions based on permanent world-wide objectives. . . . He can hardly expect other countries to seek currency agreements as long as American monetary policy is still in the experimental stage.

France. "The President naturally is flattering himself," said Le Soir, a newsorgan close to Premier Chautemps, "that his efforts have brought employment to 9,000,000 persons. Actually the United States is merely experiencing the well-being that always accompanies the start of inflation."

"Congress could end the experiments of President Roosevelt," said the Petit Parisien, also of the Premier's faction, ''but American statesmen are not distinguished for courage."

Germany. Spurred by Minister of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels, the German Press discovered that President Roosevelt and Chancellor Hitler are advancing together against the crumbling fortress of Democracy.

Berlin's Lokalanzeiger observed: "Close union of the legislative and executive branches of government, as President Roosevelt proposed, would revolutionize the American Constitution and indicate that antiquated liberalism was beaten there as in Europe."

Italy. Quick to heap praise on anyone who can be called a ''Dictator,'' Italy's well drilled Press emphasized the President's declaration that much of his recovery program will be permanent. This was hailed as evidence that the U. S. is now aping Il Duce's Corporative State.

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