THE GHOST AT THE BANQUETS

It is all too easy for both the President's admirers and opponents to slip into platitudes about last night's Victory speech. The occasion begged him to pat the party and himself on the back, and the revived memory of November could hardly have failed to infect him with extra self-confidence. This is the best excuse for the messianic tone of his remarks whose very perfection of delivery aroused enthusiasm and revulsion. No one quarrels with his key argument--that democracy must do more for the underprivileged--but the details of the redeal give pause to many.

Congress is learning how to oppose the President and to beat him. It saw that a campaign of frothy cloquence and red-herrings could persuade only two states, and has turned to the constructive strategy. Instead of parking in the middle of the President's road, to be mangled by the popular fervor he arouses when given a solid, reactionary opposition, the legislators are attacking his flank. The Sommers Bill granting full retirement pay to Supreme Court justices is an attempt to shunt the worthy aims of the administration into acceptable paths.

It is the time for those who take this hint to be working out alternative plans to those of the President. The people whom he tried to aid in the A.A.A. and the Guffey Coal Bill and the N.R.A. will not respond to violent denunciations of the law; they will rise up and vote for sounder and better-drafted measures. Likewise is it futile to roar "Communism" and "Fascism" when additions to the Supreme Court are mentioned. An effective opposition must prove to the public that the broad interpretation of the Constitution is not needed as quickly as the President thinks. In his own metaphor, revolution is farther off from his term than Sumter was from President Buchanan's.

The alarming part of the Victory speech was Roosevelt's determination to name himself as supreme genius of the new social order. He has no monopoly of humanitarian ideals nor are he and his clique the only ones who can write sound laws. To build the ark of his "more abundant life" he needs tons of objective, outside advice and a lot of rechecking. So long as he adds every no-man to the rolls of the Union League Club, so far will the construction fall short of the blue print.