The United States Government has closed the fiscal year just ended with a deficit of three and a half billion dollars. Since July 1, 1930 the national debt has been increased by fourteen and a half billion dollars. The total indebtedness of the Federal Government at the end of the last fiscal year stood at twenty-eight billion eight hundred million dollars.

The Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System has expressed the opinion that the present indebtedness of the Federal Government is not excessive, and that it can safely be raised to forty billion without danger of inflation.

The last four years have been especially responsible for the rising Federal deficit and the increase in the debt. During that period, the Federal 2Government spent huge sums of money to counteract the economic crisis and to bring relief to the millions of unemployed. In the new fiscal year just beginning, the Government intends to spend eight hundred million five hundred and twenty thousand dollars in improving the economic condition of the unemployed. The greater part of this sum will go for public works of various kinds in different parts of the United States. According to plans prepared by the Roosevelt Administration, three and a half million unemployed will receive work on the public works projects.

It is expected that by the end of the next fiscal year, the national debt will have reached thirty-three billion dollars. The Republicans severely criticize President Roosevelt and his Democratic administration, accusing them of waste and of an unnecessary increase in the national debt, which has now reached an unheard-of peacetime pinnacle. Certain newspapers now quote excerpts from Mr. Roosevelt's campaign speeches, in which he stresses the necessity of balancing the Federal budget. They compare these statements with the 3spending done by his administration, and label the expenditures as excesses, as so much squandering. The Republican press, especially, denounces the President, charging him with leading the country to ruin, into economic catastrophe. None of these critics, however, seem to be able to point out any other course of action to remedy the ills of the nation.

If the American industrialists and big businessmen would provide work for the unemployed, the Federal budget could be balanced, and there would be no deficit. Private industry, however, is not able to absorb even a small part of the army of unemployed; hence the Government must step in to save the families of the unemployed from want and starvation.

The recriminations of the Republicans that President Roosevelt has broken his campaign pledges and repudiated the Democratic party platform do not hold water, since no platform or program remains unchangeable forever. Men make platforms, and life breaks them. A society which ignores the urgent demands 4of life in order to preserve the letter of the law cannot progress and is doomed to failure. One cannot confine within the limits of a part platform all the important phenomena and the constant changes in the life of a nation without stifling the national course of that nation's development.

The recent Republican conference held in Springfield, Illinois has shown that the same Republicans who criticize President Roosevelt for violating the Democratic party platform have renounced some of their own pet tenets and principles. And this seems to be only natural, because if they had clung tenaciously to their old and worn-out slogans, life itself would have pushed them into oblivion, and the Republican party would have become a dead party--dead, that is, all the pratical political purposes of modern American life and American standards. In order to survive, the Republicans have been forced by necessity to abandon many of the traditional stand-bys of the Republican party. President Roosevelt, forced by the pressing needs of the moment, has done the same thing.