HOOVER'S MORALS

America's only living ex-President, Mr. Hoover, delivered a very moral attack on the Roosevelt administration the other night in Kansas City. From the number of times he used the word "moral", at a rough guess forty times, it is clear that morals are being safeguarded by Mr. Hoover and the Republican party while the Democrats are allowing them to rust. But paragraphs such as the following tend to make one doubt his close application to the study of morals as a science and suspect that there may be willy-nilly a touch of politics in his utterance: "The progress of mankind is in proportion to the advancement of truth and justice. These standards are fundamentally what we call morals. It is moral standards in government which sustain democracy itself."

It is not too much to ask even of a politician (which is probably not Mr. Hoover's idea of himself) that he define his terms better than is shown in "It is alone the spirit of morals that can reconcile order and freedom," and "There is a moral purpose in the universe." In the substance of his speech he merely showed the intellectual and practical impoverishment of the Republican national leadership by bringing forward the usual vague charges of corruption of the party out of power, and advocated an amateur administration of relief. The Republicans will have to find something more than this rather poor philosophy of individual morals if they are to do anything practical again.