Valedictory

For a President-reject his last speech is generally his most difficult. On domestic questions his voice has ceased to carry popular authority. On foreign issues the nations of the world are inclined to accord him only the scantiest attention. Such was the problem President Hoover faced last week when he journeyed to Manhattan to deliver his valedictory before the National Republican Club. He solved it with an address on the broad subject of gold.

As a good-by to cheering G. O.. Partisans, the President first declared:

"An organization that can show more than 15,000,000 adherents after 70 years --an irreducible minimum in the reaction from the worst depression the world has ever seen--is indeed testimony to the virility of the principles which Lincoln enunciated. Those principles assure that [the Republican Party] will be recalled to power. . . . The people determined the election. We have no complaint. As Americans we will continue wholeheartedly to do our part in promoting the well-being of the country. . . ."

Swiftly putting aside domestic politics and launching into his main theme, the President took a long look at the world at large. His voice taut and dry with earnestness, he declared:

"We are in the presence of an incipient outbreak of economic war with the weapons of depreciated currencies, artificial barriers to trade by quotas, reciprocal trade agreements, discriminations, nationalistic campaigns to consume homemade goods and a score of tactics . . . each of which adds to world confusion and dangers. . . . We find some 44 countries definitely off the gold standard. . . . The United States has held stanchly to the gold standard. . . . We have thereby maintained one Gibraltar of stability in the world and contributed to check the movement to chaos. . . . We will be forced to defensive action to protect ourselves unless this mad race is stopped. . . .

"If the world is to secure economic peace . . . the first point of attack is to secure greater stability in currencies. . . . In all the welter of discussion there are some who are maintaining that the world has outgrown the use of gold as a basis of currency and exchange. . . . But we have to remember that it is a commodity the value of which is enshrined in human instincts for over 10,000 years. The time may come when the world can safely abandon its use altogether but it has not yet reached that point. . . . The fears and apprehensions directed to the stability of first one nation and then another have caused . . . large flows of gold to meet exchange demands. . . . Thus a mass of gold dashing hither and yon from one nation to another, seeking maximum safety, has acted like a cannon loose on the deck of the world in a storm. . . .

"The solution can only be found now and found quickly through the re-establishment of gold standards among important nations. . . . Nor is it necessary that those nations who have been forced off the gold standard shall be again restored to former gold values. It will suffice if it only is fixed. ... If some part of the debt payments to us could be set aside for temporary use for this purpose, we should not hesitate to do so. ... A reasonable period of comparative stability in the world's currencies would repay the cost of such effort a hundred times over. . . .

"The American people will soon be at the fork of three roads. The first is the highway of co-operation among nations. . . . The second road is to rely upon our high degree of national self-containment . . . and thus to secure a larger measure of economic isolation. . . . The third road is that we inflate our currency, abandon the gold standard and attempt to enter a world economic war, with the certainty that it leads to complete destruction. . . . Unless the world takes heed it will find it has lost its standards of living and culture, not for a few years of depression but for generations."

P:With the 30 days of public mourning for Calvin Coolidge over. President Hoover last week resumed White House festivities. At a state dinner to the Vice President, he and Dolly Curtis Gann led the line to the table. Among the 75 guests were John Davison Rockefeller Jr. and Edsel Bryant Ford. Two days later the President entertained 85 diplomats and guests who ate from gold service.

P:Arranged last week was President Hoover's departure from Washington March 4. Immediately after Franklin Delano Roosevelt takes the oath, Citizen Hoover will be whisked to Manhattan by special train. There at 6 p. m. he will board the Panama Pacific Liner Pennsylvania, held seven hours for his convenience, and sail to Panama where he will stop for a week to try for giant sailfish before continuing to California on a Dollar Liner. With him will travel his son Allan, Citizens Arthur Mastick Hyde and Ray Lyman Wilbur, possibly Citizen Ogden Livingston Mills.

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