GHOSTS

In long-ago times the Republican party used to run this country of ours. That fact may seem incredible to the postlandslide generation, yet some items in yesterday's news reminded oldsters of the days of their youth, arousing in many a faint touch of nostalgia. Herbert Hoover and Andy Mellon, the one demanding restoration of the gold standard (O ruined relic of a bygone time!) and the other defending himself in an income-tax suit (Thus low have the great fallen!), have again been granted space in the newspapers. Smiling wistfully, yet for all their misfortune looking well-washed and respectably clothed, these ghosts from the past evoke dreams and even memories.

How many of our readers recall the days of the so-called "prosperity"? Then daily proclamations from the Department of the Treasury decreed the golden age, upon the authority of the mild-mannered gentleman who served as such a polite watchdog of the nation's finances. (Mr. Morgenthau can never hope to achieve a like benignity; the poetry of yesterday has yielded to prose.) To be a broker was not at that time the equivalent of pauperism, nor were pent-houses merely points of departure for leaps to the pavement below.

Later, when the full glory of the period of normalcy, our Augustan age, had passed, a picturesque afterglow remained. Around every corner was a breadline, now replaced, in the name of progress, with the far less romantic E.R.A. bureau. In corresponding proximity was the return of prosperity, in the phrases of a prominent and cherubic public figure of the day. All this, of course, is merely an old wives' tale to most, but for a few the ghosts who have reawakened memories of glory are living figures, of dignity as well as of pathos.