Doctrine Emphasized

Last week the Treasury announced that its deficit had risen to the unprecedented peacetime figure of $878,971,129, indicated that it would break through the billion dollar mark before the end of the fiscal year (June 30). President Hoover was thoroughly alarmed.

To the meeting of the U. S. Chamber of Commerce at Atlantic City last week went Secretary of Commerce Robert Patterson Lament to carry cautious words of cheer. Emphatically he reiterated President Hoover's major doctrine that wages must be maintained, praised Industry for the "fine spirit" with which it has responded to this White House "request."'

Few days later to a group of world bankers attending the International Chamber of Commerce went Andrew Mellon. For the first time in nearly two years he gave his views on economic conditions. And he, too, opposed wage cutting. Said he: "Prices must be revised and costs of production and output must be brought down . . . and this must be done without a general reduction in wages, provided the period of readjustment is not too long drawn out, and on condition also that we reduce costs by greater efficiency in labor, in management, and in distribution."

And his climax was as follows: "Anyone who has witnessed the new invention, the birth of new industry . . . which has so vastly increased the wealth of the world and altered our entire mode of living within the memory of those present, cannot be discouraged about either the immediate or the distant future. The opportunities which have so multiplied in the last generation are only the forerunners of perhaps greater ones, which will come as the result of forces now at work and constantly being discovered. . . .

"I have no means of knowing when or how we shall emerge from the valley in which we are now traveling. But I do know that, as in the past, the day will come when we shall find ourselves on a more solid economic foundation and the onward march of progress will be resumed."

The rising cost of government last week moved Senator William Edgar Borah to declare: "The ever-growing burden of taxation is one of the great factors in bringing about our present Depression. . . . The most wasteful and extravagant part of the Government is this bureaucracy, nation wide, which we are building up. ... In the last two years we have established 26 Government commissions with their thousands of employes. ..."

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