LITTLE ORPHAN ANNIE

An issue riddled Senate has rejected Judge Parker who has been a storm cearer in the question of filling the Supreme Court chair left vacant by the late Justice Sanford. Party lines have been more tenuous than they were in the good days when a Republican lived on bread and beer a Democrat lived on bread and beer and both fought for hours about the tariff.

Everyone has his pet reasons for the defeat of the administration candidate. Those whose imaginations are more eloquent than their wisdom loss off their inhibitions and express the conviction that the present case is just another example of the insidious action of the dread hand of socialism or some other unmentionable force working to upset the present political organization of the country.

Such names are losing their traditional connotations of smoking bombs, unkempt whiskers, and savage red eyes. Loss and less are these experimental forms of government being feared. Lucretius says that children fear the dark; the dark, however, is only a place which is not yet light. Even the Carlsbad caverns have lost their gloom, but only those who have the light can see in the cave.

To some, socialism is blackness and despair: to others, it is the shining goal of progress, perhaps when the two get together they will see more of both light and shadow. In the meantime, the spectacle of grown up children fearing the dark and imagining things to be which are not, is humorous, perhaps ironic.