At Chattanooga

While bankers, gay, convened in Houston, Tex., their borrowers (members of the National Association of Manufacturers) last week concluded their convention at Chattanooga, Tenn., in an atmosphere of gloom.

Said President John Emmet Edgerton of Lebanon, Tenn.: "Bankers are not worrying since they own the country body and souL Importers, merchants, all are having a picnic enjoying the country's 'prosperity' except those by whose enterprise the wealth of the nation is produced." He meant the manufacturers.

"Outside the few gigantic corporations which don't have to bother about competition," cried he, "and by whose large profits the public is misled, the common run of manufacturers in America today are in about as unhappy a condition as their fellow producers, the farmers. I challenge the statisticians to overturn that statement."

Things that disturbed Mr. Edgerton and his colleagues were "the nation's $10,000,000,000 crime bill," and "socialistic encroachments" by the Federal and State governments, and the meddling by ministers of the gospel whose interpretations from the pulpit of business methods and affairs he dismissed as the comments of tyros.

The association took the customary slap at corporate taxation registered at all business gatherings, advocated a nonpartisan tariff commission and urged a "hands off" policy on the part of the government with regard to public utility regulation.