THE ISOLATION DREAM

Announcement comes from Washington of a "campaign to stop hoarding." House-to-house canvasses will be made throughout the nation, urging pater families to withdraw his money from the chimney-hole and put it in the corner bank. Colonel Knox, director of the campaign, has said that it "must convince people that the banks are vital to their own interests. The bank is a part of the machinery of life." The people who have lost their life-savings by the closing of banks throughout the country certainly will be surprised to hear that.

The administration seems to retain the impression that you can cure the patient by talking him out of being sick. The under-lying assumption of the campaign against hoarding is that the banks only fell because people didn't put money in them. Might it be whispered that in some cases the money was taken out because the banks were falling? Few people will be impressed by the declaration that "the limitation of American business to a domestic basis, would bring back at least ninety percent of the former prosperity of this nation." It amounts to the assertion that the simultaneous to the assertion that the simultaneous economic troubles of the various nations were mere coincidences, and that they have no real relationship to one another. Which is what the Japanese government said about the occupations of Manchuria and Shanghai.