Site Ed. Note: So how close did real Nazis ever get to Charlotte? "Two Versions" has it pretty close.

The Party

It Belongs to the People Who Go to Precinct Meetings

So you didn't go to your Democratic precinct meeting this afternoon, eh? Neither did we.

A very few of us if any will take the trouble to go to the County Democratic Convention next Saturday and of course not to the state convention, in Raleigh the Saturday after that. We couldn't go as delegates in fact unless we had attended the county convention and been officially elected.

And many of us are going to be complaining a little later on that we don't like the Presidential favorite our state conventioneers have picked out, that the Democratic Party in North Carolina is the creature of a self-selected gang of professional politicians, that we might as well be Republicans or Mugwumps for all the voice we have in party matters.

And so we might, except for the minute consolation of voting for state officers in Democratic primaries. Nevertheless, there's nobody much to blame except ourselves, and our own inertia.

For a political party, messires, is founded on organization as tight as the old Macedonian Phalanx, and the only way to amount to anything in it is to be a good little Democrat and be seen and heard at your precinct meetings, whence you may progress to the county convention and perhaps be singled out for some petty office.

It sounds a good deal of a bore, and we think it must be. But that's the way you get to know and be known by the party hetmen, to whom this sort of stuff is not a bore at all, but the bread and potatoes of their existence.

Two Versions

But Adolf's Account Is Somewhat More Convincing

Adolf Hitler is a good deal more candid than his consul general at New Orleans, Baron von Spiegel.

The Baron stopped over in Charlotte last night and explained that Nazi Germany is not really an aggressor bent on conquest at all. What she is, he said, is a great champion of liberty, out on a glorious crusade to free suffering humanity from the tyranny of wicked old England. Why, you simply can't do anything without England's consent as matters stand--look at the "navicerts," he said, which American ships must have if they don't want to be stopped as they enter the Mediterranean.

The Baron, however, discreetly said nothing about the fact that American ships cannot enter Northern European waters at all because we know on conclusive evidence that the German submarines would sink them without warning if they chose, and drown their crews.

As for enslaving the nations which the Nazis overrun, that was all nonsense, said the Baron. True, there are Poland and Czechoslovakia--but this is war. Once it is over, things will be different.

He neglected, however, to say why they were not different wherever the Nazi power had extended itself before the war started.

Adolf was more frank, in "Mein Kampf," made it quite plain that he might require the whole world, and that he certainly meant to have Europe either as his outright property or his puppet at the least. And that in the world he would make, all opposition would be ruthlessly exterminated by the simple process of murdering the opposers, that the Germans would constitute the master class and chief beneficiaries of the new order, and that the role of the rest of the peoples would be that of serfs who worked for the Germans.

The facts, as we know them, fit with Adolf's version, not the Baron's.

Safe Enough

Senator Thomas Need Not Lie Awake Over This

The Hon. Elbert Thomas, Senator, in Congress from Utah, can sleep well of nights if he believes in his own theories.

The argument in the Senate last week was over the question of continuing to buy the silver of foreign countries at absurdly pegged prices. And Mr. Thomas, as always, was hot for continuing it.

Now because he was fearful that if it were ever once admitted that the present silver policy of the United States is silly as regards foreign countries, somebody might have a lucid moment to remember that it is also silly as regards domestic silver mines--of which Utah has a great share. Not that.

Perish the wicked, ignoble thought, said Mr. Thomas. There are times when a man must rise above mere local interests, when he must look at things in a large way. And his real reason for fighting to keep us at the policy of paying nearly twice the real value of foreign silver was that he was afraid that if we didn't we might presently find ourselves without adequate metallic bases for our money.

The gentleman seems to be forehanded, at least. For at present the United States has eighteen billion smackers worth of gold (itself artificially priced) in a big hole in Kentucky, and about two billion dollars worth of monetary silver. There are even unkind people who say the United States will never be able to use it all for monetary bases. But that is probably because they lack the imagination of Senator Thomas.