Problems of Recovery

Abstract

To speak of economic conditions or policies to a group like this would be, in the language of theology, a work of supererogation. We at Washington are the performers on the stage; since God does not bestow the gift of seeing ourselves as others see us, you must tell us how we look-and I understand you have been doing so. I remember what old Dr. Johnson once said of critics. A poet had been complaining about a particularly savage criticism and had retorted that the critic could not produce half so good a poem himself. Sir, said the Doctor, I am not a carpenter and I cannot build a house, yet I know mighty well whether a house is good to live in. And so it would be unfair to the critics to ask them to produce an economic policy which would be better than ours. Maybe they could -probably they could-yet if not, no matter. I venture to enter into no competition with the critics, God bless them, and to make no answer to them. Rather I wish to fraternize with them as in a sense one of them. I too have been a critic in my time, as who hasn't? But what I more particularly mean is that I wish to fraternize with them as a fellow student of a problem which is the problem of all of us, and to say just a word about the approach to the critical task and about the standards and the yardstick which criticism applies. Let me turn aside again for a moment to an outside field, the field of literary criticism. Too frequently I have noticed that the critic seems to develop some pet yardstick, some single standard which he magnifies into the touchstone of everything. One critic is a realist, he condemns every work which does not reek of the raw red meat of life-lhe will have none of it. Another is a humanist-nothing is good which does not celebrate the Puritan verities. A third is a protagonist of social reform-to him art is not art unless it has a political purpose. I sometimes seem to recognize a trace of this critical worship of some single yardstick in the field of economic criticism-the obsession with a single test of economic health or of the wisdom of economic policy. It may be that there is some royal arcanum, some philosopher's stone or Aladdin's lamp which holds the secret of prosperity. And yet when I think of this exclusive attention to some single phase of a problem of enormous complexity, I am reminded of a remark 155