SMOKE?

Everybody knows that Charles G. Dawes is an authority upon German credit, how we won the war, and the interference of La Salle Street pidgeons with grain transactions on the Chicago Board of Trade. But that he was also an authority upon chaos, what constitutes it, and how to get there, was not generally known until, he made his recent speech in Minneapolis.

It was peculiarly appropriate that in this same speech he dismissed in a word the charge of his connection with the Lorimer Bank case as being like "sulphuretted hydrogen, leaving only a bad smell". Bad smells are not out of place in chaos. A bad smell together with complete indefiniteness furnish good backgrounds for a discussion of chaos. It is certainly true that Senator Wheeler's story has raised an unsavory smell; and equally true that the story and the smell were both current in the Middle West before Senator Wheeler gave them wider dirculation.

Mr. Dawes, as head of the commission which drafted the Dawes Report, is a strong buttress, to the Republican ticket. But Mr. Dawes, as the suspeoted backer of Lorimer in his famous swindle, has the double aspect and doubtful value of a political interrogation point.