LADIES ALL

The Daughters of the American Revolution have poured the vials of their colonial malice on the head of Professor Felix Frankfurter, urging with factious vehemence that he be excluded from any Federal appointment. The crusade will take the form of letters to President Roosevelt, carefully warning him of Professor Frankfurter's liberalism, of the dangerous movements to which he has ventured to lend the weight of his influence in the past, of his general radicalism and undesirability.

Professor Frankfurter, like many of his colleagues, has found many phases of our social and legal system unsatisfactory, and has not hesitated to attack them. When this is formulated as a charge, one can only answer with deep gravity and with deeper contempt that it is perfectly true. But in another sense, there is a certain guerdon won by any liberal who incurs the enmity of the D. A. R. Professor Frankfurter will join a remarkably white company. Jane Adams, who was vulgar enough to feed starving immigrants and to educate them, achieved disrepute with the feminine Torquemadas, as did Mary Woolley and John Haynes Holmes. None of these disagreeable people believed in the bland assumption that all that is, is right.

Possibly Torquemada is too real and lusty a term to apply to a society dominated by forces so complacent and so suburban. The nexus that binds these captious ladies with Saratoga and Bunker Hill has come to be a mere bloodless atavism. Probably the catholicity of vision required to realize that George Washington was, after all, a rebel, would be too much to ask of his spiritual daughters. But, at least, they might find innocuous content in polishing their guns and genealogies, and withdraw their febrile antiquarianism from the serious problems of politics and government.