Iron Men

Four Teutons, each famed as an "Iron Man" at one time or another, clashed last week and clanked.

Iron Adolf Hitler, Fascist victor in the last election (TIME, Sept. 22), warned iron President Paul von Hindenburg that if iron Chancellor Heinrich Bruening again dissolves the Reichstag and continues to rule Germany under the "emergency clause" (Article 48) of the Constitution, "then the Bruening Government is illegal and will provoke a large part of the German people also to resort to illegal methods."

Chancellor Bruening stuck to his threat, hammered out for enactment (by decree, if the Reichstag refuses to vote it next week) a Reform program which metal-minded German editors at once called "the iron broom of destiny."

Program points: 1) salaries of all high federal and state officials, from President von Hindenburg to Deputies of the Reichstag and State Diets, to be cut 20%; 2) wages of all other federal, state and municipal functionaries, including German State Railwaymen, cut 6%; 3) rejuggling of taxation to avert an estimated $250,000,000 deficit at the end of the fiscal year (the tobacco tax, for example, being raised $40,000,000) plus a $125,000,000 "Reform Loan" to be floated (probably by Manhattan's Lee, Higginson & Co. heading an international group).

Nearly all these "reforms" (except the loan) were urged last spring by former Agent General for Reparations Seymour Parker Gilbert, No. 1 Rutgers alumnus, no iron man (TIME, June 23). Last week as Chancellor Bruening banged his budget into shape he paused only once to jangle out an angry statement that the German Cabinet certainly did not approve what was being said in New York by Germany's cast-iron Dr. Hjalmar Schacht.

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