HARKEN UNTO MY VOICE

With longer and better discussions of gold-standard economics separating his flambuoyant portraits of Wall Street personalities, Father Coughlin has again rolled a sonorous hour's speech along the national networks. Again the bankers, professors, senators, braintrusters, labor leaders, and even cardinals can read it with detached approval or dissent, not a little bored by the purely popular reactions to the scientific, unemotional experiments of the administration.

In a recent essay, J. B. S. Haldane, the English Biochemist, on reasoning from the study of plant and animal habits, finds that the three great classes of human parasites are Bankers, Brokers, and Bishops. From reasoning, no less definite, but far more convincing, the Radio Priest arrives at the same conclusion (except for the Bishops). If Father Coughlin makes "House of Morgan" and "gold-" into adjectives more colorful than exact, the ideas could not be decently expressed for popular consumption with other words. A five-foot shelf of Economic Quarterlies cannot prove as he does, that there are forty thousand millionaires too many in this country; nor will any number of Treatises on Money express as pungently that the "money problem essentially a moral problem, relating to the principles of justice." More pertinent to the constructive side of his damnations, is the strong fatherly method in which he extends salvation to a picked few of the forty thousand; the rare, trade-minded industrialists like Henry Ford and his peers; while he lets those who use money to make merely money, sink with the gold-standard of unsound, dishonest debts.

Father Coughlin and his demagogic speeches are the stuff that revolutions are made of. Men will revolt, to use his unique phrase, to "drive the money-changers from the temple," or to abolish the power of gold, without worrying about the essential need of middlemen, or of a currency system. If his economic premises are inaccurate, he can reply he is not interested in teaching economics; but desires "to weave together the facts." It is a method which the Roman Church has never been afraid to use, in the fact of its own logicians. But his ideas are not all Roman, nor all Christian. Here is a Catholic who quotes Karl Marx for America, who praises Henry Ford, who showers America with a million free copies of his bound speeches. Surely Father Coughlin is a vigorous anomaly.

Father Coughlin and his demagogic speeches are the stuff that revolutions are made of. Men will revolt, to use his unique phrase, to "drive the money-changers from the temple," or to abolish the power of gold, without worrying about the essential need of middlemen, or of a currency system. If his economic premises are inaccurate, he can reply he is not interested in teaching economics; but desires "to weave together the facts." It is a method which the Roman Church has never been afraid to use, in the fact of its own logicians. But his ideas are not all Roman, nor all Christian. Here is a Catholic who quotes Karl Marx for America, who praises Henry Ford, who showers America with a million free copies of his bound speeches. Surely Father Coughlin is a vigorous anomaly.