CHARGE OF INSANITY IS HURLED BACK AND FORTH

"Corn burned for fuel in Kansas, ships idle, thousands starving in Europe, is not this proof of a certain insanity in the world?"

This question was part of an appeal to abandon devotion to "outworn and discredited capitalism," made by Norman Thomas, chairman of the League for Industrial Democracy, in the debate on Socialism held at the Liberal Club Saturday night. Mr. Thomas' opponent, supporter of capitalism, was Professor J. Murray Carroll of Bates College. The debate was the feature of Saturday's session of the New England Student Conference, which was held here during the week-end under the auspices of the League for Industrial Democracy.

"The lunacy of the world," Mr. Thomas said, "is less evident in America than elsewhere. But even here there is a large mass of hungry folk, and many others with more food than they can consume. We are challenged today by the enormous, incalcuable waste of our way of doing business, with its waste of machinery, of men, of the efforts of mass labor, and above all, with its waste from war. Ours is a system which contains the seeds of inevitable war, a system which is not only going to breakdown, but which has broken down, and functions today most miserably in many parts of Europe. We must substitute service for profit as the supreme motive in life, and begin social organization and the deliberate planning of industry. In America unlike Europe, there is time to apply intelligence to the working out of a new system before the inevitable crash of capitalism."

Professor Carroll, in reply, suggested that the first manifestation of lunacy is being given to hallucinations, and that that is the fault of Socialists. "It is easy," he said, "to find evils in any institutional system. But those are the evils inherent in human nature, evils which socialist attribute to the system." He sketched the points in favor of capitalism, discussed the Russian debacle and other failures of Socialism, and declared that, until Socialists can produce a clear-cut concrete scheme, there is no justification for replacing the present system, which has evolved slowly and adjusted itself to the needs of society.