"Crisis of Confidence"

British opinion voiced in and out of the House of Commons appeared last week to have reached a new estimate of Franklin Roosevelt. When the President at the opening of his first term gave vigorous encouragement to the World Economic Conference convened in London by Prime Minister James Ramsay MacDonald, and then proceeded from Washington to withdraw his support and wreck that conference, British public opinion was incensed. Soon afterward, however, the British began little by little to be dazzled by the bursting glory of the New Deal. Their own Cabinet, under the Rt. Hon. Stanley Baldwin and his budget-balancing Chancellor of the Exchequer Neville Chamberlain, began to seem a group of humdrum stick-in-the-muds compared to the spectacular humanism radiating from the White House. During much of the short reign of Edward VIII those British subjects who admired what they considered His Majesty's spectacular humanism saw in this spirit something their whole kingdom should copy from the United States. During 1937, with Britain's Constitutional Crisis irrevocably and popularly settled, the broad revulsion of Britons has carried them back to renewed esteem for the normal British methods of conducting affairs, and naturally they have come at the same time to see President Roosevelt in a fresh light.

Excerpts from recent, year-end British speeches and statements:

Robert John Graham Boothby is one of the British Conservative Party's ablest young men who entered the House of Commons 13 years ago. aged 24, and served as Parliamentary Private Secretary to Chancellor of the Exchequer Winston Churchill (TIME, Nov. 27, 1924, et seq.). He told the House that President Roosevelt's policies "violate every economic principle," then issued a survey making his points in detail.

"At the end of last year the authorities in Washington came to the conclusion, for reasons best known to themselves, that there was danger of an inflationary boom. . . . They proceeded to administer a series of shocks to the markets of the world which by midsummer this year had succeeded in completely shattering confidence. . . .

"The President promised among other things to bring about a planned recovery, to reduce unemployment, to look after the interests of the small man, to stabilize commodity prices, and to prevent violent market fluctuations. Recovery has now been checked, the volume of unemployment is rising sharply, thousands of small investors have been impoverished, there has been a steep fall in the commodity-price level, and the fluctuations of the market during the past three months . . . have been more violent than at any time since 1929. . . .

"In Great Britain there is yet no sign of any real abatement or check of activity. Here the production of capital goods, based upon the combination of Cheap Money and Confidence, remains at a high level. . . . But in view of the serious recession which has unquestionably occurred in America, and the severe shocks to confidence which have been administered, it would be unwise to anticipate any sustained [world] recovery. . . ."

Brendan Bracken, another leading House of Commons member of the "ginger group"--M. P.s in their middle 303, many of whom have business interests in The City--recently visited the U. S. to judge for himself of President Roosevelt and the economic situation. Among several London newsorgans in which energetic Brendan Bracken has an interest is the Financial News. Last week none of his friends needed to be told who had written for this London paper "HOW TO CREATE A DEPRESSION--President Roosevelt's Recipe--By a Correspondent." Ex- cerpts: "Mr. Roosevelt, like most vocal humanitarians, is a great hater. . . . Roosevelt's punitive mind is mirrored in the drastic extension of the Capital Gains Tax. . . . Working men may be forgiven for thinking that Mr. Roosevelt's passion for half-baked reforms has reformed them out of their jobs. . . . As a result of [the Roosevelt Administration's] crazy experiments in taxation and their policy of harassing industry, the lights are going out in factories all over America. The direful 'No Men Wanted' signs are brought out of storage. ... If the economic royalists were responsible for the last depression,

Mr. Roosevelt and his budding commissars must take the responsibility for this one. . . .

"It is the New Dealers . . . who are the real menace to American prosperity. . . . Until they cease to have power to run the Federal Government, confidence will not return to America. . . . Congress may be incoherent, but it is not so flippant as the President and his posse of experimenting and irresponsible advisors. . . . Will they dare to ring down the curtain on the President's prima donna performances which are at the root of this Crisis of Confidence? . . .

"No man's head, however big, could carry all Mr. Roosevelt thinks he knows. . . . One day an inflationist, the next a deflationist. A fixer of prices who denounces his own creations, a giver of what he calls 'the more abundant life' who orders the destruction of food while millions of his fellow-countrymen are undernourished. A great preacher of free speech who threatened the political ruin of the Senator who for the sake of principle opposed his Supreme Court 'reform.' A bitter critic of bureaucracy who has created so many bureaux that Washington cannot contain them. A stern advocate of economy who has spent more money than any President in the history of the United States

"In the light of these inconsistencies, can it be denied that 'confidence' and Mr. Roosevelt go ill together? The power to create a state of uncertainty in which no businessman or investor will incur risk is vested in the President of the United States. Mr. Roosevelt is the first President who thought fit to use that power. Every ounce of it was applied. Neither graphs, nor economic jargon, nor statistics are required to show how Mr. Roosevelt made the depression which should always bear his name. He created it by methods which were as direct as they were effective."

Winston Churchill, now a British elder statesman, onetime Chancellor of the Exchequer, Home Secretary, Colonial Secretary and War Secretary, sonorously summed up in London last week the new British view: "The quarrel in which President Roosevelt has become involved with wealth and business may produce results profoundly harmful to the ideals which to him and his people are dear.

"It is surely far better to allow the productive forces of capital and credit to create wealth and abundance and then, by corrective taxation of profits, meet the needs of the weak and poor! Instead, the Washington Administration has waged so ruthless a war on private enterprise that the United States, with none of the perils and burdens of Europe upon it, is actually at the present moment leading the world back into the trough of depression.

"A prosperous United States exerts directly and indirectly an immense beneficent force upon world affairs. Those who are keeping the flag of peace and free government flying in the old world have almost the right to ask that their comrades in the new world should, during these years of exceptional and not diminishing danger, set an example of strength and stability. There is one way above all others in which the United States can aid European democracies. Let her regain and maintain her normal prosperity."

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