GOD AND THE BALLOT BOX

The pulpit, which always finds it hard to condone the decadence of contemporaneous life, has now collected its adherents to pray for virtuous guidance in the April primary at Chicago. It has become traditional to speak of the seat of America's most recent demagogue as the haunt of light fingered but heavy handed artists, notables for whom the open spaces of Cook country breed only potential victims or competitors; but, in the opinion of the clergy, conditions have reached a parlous state since the last elections, and it is scarcely safer there for a private citizen than it would be for George Windsor.

Indeed, to its spiritual leaders. Sodom and Gomorrah appear as naught beside Chicago, which is anathematized as the home of all that is corrupt, where vice abounds unchecked by conniving officialdom and the people are at the mercies of bombs and poisonous liquors. So the churchmen gather to pray that the growing pains of the turbulent city may be abated and that the ballot box may no longer yield a forced crop of magistrates. But yesterday's declaration of faith seems hardly the means by which to procure the metamorphosis at a time when gangsters scoff at the impotence of the righteous and a strong, materialistic hand is needed, rather than an aesthetic gesture, to raise the level of Chicago affairs to the average of democratic maladministration.