MR. LIPPMANN HAILS MR. ROOSEVELT

When Lincoln Steffens plucked him out of Harvard in the '10's, Walter Lippmann was a progressive, so much so that his first book, "A Preface to Politics," identified him with Steffens himself. Since the War, it would seem, from the convolutions of Mr. Lippmann's mind, that he has been attacked by that disease so common among political commentators and critics of the American scene, the disease of terminology. His eyes, searching for a quiet and secure resting place, have seized upon communism, pacifism, fascism and turned them into the little pink elephants which many of his indulgent readers find on their walls. In truth he has become embittered because he has been unable to settle into a political philosophy which would snugly fit the changing world. it irks him that he cannot objectify what suits him personally, that he can find nothing static, nothing permanent, nothing resembling the unity and coherence of medieval times. Thus it was that he made out of President Roosevelt's masterfully worded and perfectly times Message on the State of the Union "a landmark in the history of Western thought."

Adding a new catch-word to his growing collection, Mr. Lippmann fixed on the President's references to religion as being the casiest to distort. With a skill derived from experience, he took Mr. Roosevelt's concept of devout, pious, moral religion and deliberately confused it with the medieval dogma of temporal churches. And out of this tortured thinking he drew a religion of his own making, "mysticism" as practised by the Oxford Group, passive, ennervating, a religion that would do away with such Marxian innovations as strikes, wage increase demands and the class struggle in general. Labelling this the new democratic philosophy, Mr. Lippmann took no credit for it himself, but laid it reverently on the White House doorstep.

It must be difficult to pontificate on the daily happenings of this hectic would and one sympathizes with the columnist's tendency to formularize. But when the keynote speech of the head of the Democratic party is "simplified" into a Republican tract, the time has come to warn the ingenuous author that the reading public draws the line somewhere.