What Would Lincoln Say?

Canadian wages are frozen; so are manufacturers' wholesale prices and the retail prices of everything in Canada, from popguns to butter. The man responsible is 40-year-old Donald Gordon, self-educated Scots immigrant who is chairman of Canada's Wartime Prices and Trade Board.

The restrictions Gordon slapped on the Canadian public in 1941, designed to stop inflation, were the most stringent of any democracy's until Australia, in the face of Japanese invasion, went for all-out conscription. Canadians took them in their stride. But last week they wondered what next. In Montreal, their No. 1 economic controller announced that Canada's present competitive system must be replaced by one "based entirely on the criterion of maximum production."

To win the war, said Gordon, "selfish or private interest must be ruled out. . . . Let us paraphrase Abraham Lincoln: Let it be 'regimentation of the people, by the people and for the people.' "

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