Evening star., 1945-01-21
Democracy Under
Pressure
By Stuart Chase. (T1Oentieth
Cent1ru Fund. ST.
Tomorrow's S Business
By Beardsley Ruml. (Farrar {

oy DC" uotCy AuHtt. tf uff~ vi w
Rinehdrt; $780,
1t may be matter of surprise to
many readers to find Stuart Chase
and Beardsley Ruml standing on the
same economic ground, but here
they are, the left wing and the right
peacefully folded.
Mr.. Ruml is conspicuous in the
kind of business known as big. He
is treasurer of R. H. Macy & Co,
he is member of the research
committee of the Committee for
Economic Development. he Is chair
man of the Federal Reserve Bank
of New York.
Mr.. Chase Is in even less need
of introduction. He has long been
the fair-haired boy of radical eco
nomic thinking. In his current
book, moreover, he shoots some
irreverent arrows in Mr.. Rumls di-
rection, marked with Mr.. Ruml's
name. But when the two gentlemen
sum up one finds them in sweet
accord.
The only catch is that the accord
seems to be too sweet. 1t Is not set
on financial ground but idealistic-
where it is safe for any opponents
to get together. The harmony is
like that which obtains between
diplomats when they announce to
the world that they are in perfect
agreement-in principle.
For the Common Good.
Mr.. Chase naturally begins his
book with an assault. He is a
born literary storm trooper He
charges in on three big" pressure
groups which, he declares, are
threatening our democracy by their
selfish lobbying-big business, big
labor and big agriculture. In one
of those sustained pyrotechnic out
bursts of which he is so dazzling
master he exposes the sins of all
three which, in his view, add up
to an ignoring of the interests of
the consumer whom all are supposed
to serve and a cynical misuse of
the legislative power.
Then, for a moment, gloom seems
to engulf even his valiant optimism
and he suggests that the only rem
edy is big Government. But he
comes out radiant from under the
cloud and spreads an enhancing
rainbow over the final passages
of his book. Let us have a great
moral reawakening, he urges. Let
us all lay aside our selfish interests
and work for the common good.
Nobody in the world could say a
word against that.
Mr.. Ruml is not anywhere near
as amusing He just plods along
As he is writing down, trying to ex-
plain business to the non-business
reader, he sticks to words of few
syllables and sort of primerlike
simplicity. For the main part of
his book his title is misleading. He
is not discussing the possible shape
OF business to come. but explaining
how business works. He tells us
how it works in the basic sense in
any society and then he tells us
how it works in the particular
sense in our own.
A Private Government.
Business, he says, is, like the fam
lily and the church, sort of private
government. AS it exists in our own
country today, its control theoreti-
cally lies in the hands of stock
holders, with the ultimate power
vested in the consumer, while -
theoretically again - employees are
free agents who can change their
jobs when they do not like their
working conditions.
Neither theory, however, is effec-
tive in practice, Mr.. Ruml observes
with placid business. Stockholders
and consumers really have very