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Show THE BEAUTIES OF RELIEF. There seems to have been considerable consider-able bewilderment and adverse comment com-ment in the air over newspaper reports re-ports of some of the activities performed per-formed by so-called white-collared workers in certa'n New York City telief programs. Among the reported activities for which the taxpayer is pay'ng are mak:ng maps of the Balkans, Bal-kans, and other places including an Lsothermic map of the Mediterranean Mediterran-ean basin as it was in the time of the ancient Romans, maps of the "movements of people in the second millenium," and a "model of m'le-stones m'le-stones in social welfare." A chicken survey is reported, designed to ascertain ascer-tain the kind of birds which the thrifty housewife buys on Saturday, and one project was to ascerta'n the karmng habits of most adults although al-though any bright young New Derler ought to be able to tell us that adults can't learn anything. This latter project pro-ject included among other things a bicycle ergometer "to measure' the cost of physical work in terms of metabolism used in psychological experimentation." ex-perimentation." A geograph'cal map war also being made showing location of Greek dialects. An investigation of relief work developed de-veloped the information that over three millions had been spent on amusement for unemployed. Snce a great deal of time was devoted to teaching ballet tripping it is presumed presum-ed that the unemployed were entertained enter-tained by dancing. This is of course quite proper. The unemployed must he amused. It has been too cold to play baseball but certainly the weather wea-ther has been fine for dancing except ex-cept fan dancing. Since this all is happening in New , York it might have been possible to blame it on to the dizzy Greenwich I v'llage influence and so to have shunted criticism from the New Deal at Washington. Unfortunately, how-ever, how-ever, Federal Relief Administrator Harry L. Hopkins tied up his federal feder-al governmental activit'es sympathetically sympa-thetically at least by charging that ithe critics of this New York relief brainstorm were "too damned dumb 1 , to appreciate the finer things of l'fe." White statement is replied, to editorially edi-torially by the Washington Post with these rather caustic remarks: "Of all the unmit'gated tripe dished I out by members of the administra-tion administra-tion in two highly loquacious years, this blurb by Harry, in favor of the farcical New York 'white collar' work i relief projects, 's about the most ridiculous. ridi-culous. That it could be seriously uttered ut-tered by a responsible official of any but a comic opera government would seem incredible. It sounds more like j a cue for Vice-Presidnt Throttlebot-tom Throttlebot-tom to take the stage. "Close to $5,000,000,000 is now about to be turned over to the ad-min'stration ad-min'stration for work-relief projects beside which the grotesque projects flourishing in New York may pale ; into significance. Constructive sug-: gestions for the expenditure of this sum are in order. Why not a thorough psychoanalysis, by a committee Of: unemployed psychiatrists, of those responsible for FERA policies?" We think perhaps the Post is a lit-1 tie too severe on Mr. Hopkins. Maybe ; some of us have been so busy trying to raise money to pay taxes to keep these things go ng that we are not sufficiently educated. All Mr. Hop- kins' frier.ds have to do is to spend the money the taxpayers kick in, j which isn't so difficult and which 1 leaves some leisure to the federal arrents for contemplating the beauties beau-ties of the Mediterranean in the time of Nero, etc. And again, a geographic-j al map of the location of Greek dialects dia-lects would he invaluable to those who are compelled to eat in restaurants. restaur-ants. Of course, information on chickens chick-ens is rather out of date in these days when it takes all our money to buy even a dish iot breast of lamb, but you have to admit that a bicycle ' ergometer would be a fine thing for little Willie if he didn't hurt himself j trying to learn to ride it. |