Rhodes Scholars

No Rhodes scholar is to be trusted in the editorial department of a U.S. newspaper, for his association with Englishmen may be presumed to have made him an unpatriotic propagandist. In education he is even more dangerous, for the young people of the U. S. are an impressionable lot. He might be given a business job if concern had no foreign trade and never touched a foreign bond. If he should become a laborer, he might poison union minds with European socialism. As a scientist he would have to be watched, for there is no telling what dastardly machines he might sell to the enemies of the U. S. Even as a barber, his chatting to customers might lead to the fermenting of the un-American ideas. What, then, can a Rhodes Scholar do when he returns to the U. S. after three years at Oxford? Practically nothing--if the words of Congressman Fred Albert Britten of Illinois and the editorials of William Randolph Hearst's newspapers are carried to a logical conclusion.

Congressman Britten stood up in the House of Representatives, three weeks ago, and said: "Run down the newspapers who oppose this legislation [for the benefit of the U. S. Navy], look into their editorial departments and you will find Rhodes scholarship men, British subjects, propagandists and pacifists controlling them." Mr. Britten particularly mentioned the New York Times, New York World, Baltimore Sun.

Last week Mr. Hearst's Washington Herald seized Mr. Britten's speech with a cry of joy, and spread the Rhodes Scholarship paragraph in extra big and extra black type as a text for an editorial which covered the entire top-half of a page.

But Mr. Hearst himself has been accused of using his papers to exert improper influence upon the foreign relations of the U. S. In February, President Coolidge made a speech criticizing but not naming certain newspapers. The speech was taken to be a rebuke to Mr. Hearst for having published fake Mexican "documents."' Last week the Hearst editorial had the effrontery to link that same Coolidge speech with Britten Anglophobia, implying that both were directed at the New York Times, New York World, Baltimore Sun.