Baruch's Tribunal

"During my younger days in Wall Street I had contact with the older financiers and with the great railroad barons--the ferocious cigar-chewing men who drove back the frontier with every blow on an iron spike. Then years later I was in Washington during the most stirring period of the War; and after that I went to Paris and saw the statesmen of a dozen flags sew the map of Europe into something they hoped would stay together. . . . I've had a vivid life."

So, a few years ago, spoke tall Bernard Mannes Baruch, speculator and financier extraordinary, economist, authority on mineral waters. His father was a Prussian-Polish Jew who emigrated to the U. S., served as a field surgeon in General Lee's army; his mother was the daughter of a Southern planter. Bernard Mannes Baruch went north as a young man, became famed for his market operations, his floating of the great Goldfield Consolidated Mining Co. during the panic of 1907 and, later, for his services as Chairman of the War Industries Board. Memories of this last occupation gave him material for a speech before the Boston Chamber of Commerce last week. While of late he has been devoting himself to the development of Saratoga Springs, N. Y., as a State health resort, this speech concerned not the health of humans but the economic health of the world.

His specific suggestion was the creation of an international noncoercive business tribunal, the conception of which he said arose in the minds of men who, working on the War Industries Board, saw U. S. industry combined "in effective cooperative endeavor" in order "to work out a vast problem for the common good." That this would be remote from all governmental or political agencies he stressed, saying, "Bit by bit we have almost completely bartered away our birthright of economic freedom because industry, unable to solve its own problems, has left no alternative to an appeal to government."

The nature of this proposed tribunal was clearer when Mr. Baruch added: "No repressive, inquisitorial, mediocre bureau will answer; we must have a new concept for this purpose, a tribunal vested, like the Supreme Court, with so much prestige and dignity that our greatest business leaders will be glad to divest themselves of any personal interest in business and there serve. . . . Its deliberations should be in the open and should be wholly scientific. . . ."

Of the present system, he charged: "It may have been sound public policy to forbid by law anything that looked to regulation of production when the world was fearful of famine, but it is public lunacy to decree unlimited operation of a system which periodically disgorges indigestible masses of unconsumable products."

While Mr. Baruch was speaking, two events were occurring which gave his suggestions unusual timeliness. First was that U. S. security markets, reflecting the continued gravely depressed state of trade, again dropped precipitately (only to whip upward with the new week--8,279,000 shares traded on the New York Stock Exchange, 2,545,400 on the curb). Second, that in Washington the U. S. Chamber of Commerce was finishing its 18th annual convention (TIME, May 5). As the nearest approach to an organized stabilizer of U. S. Business, the Chamber reported its observations (including President Butterworth's description of the recent business cycle as "wayward and fickle") and wrangled over remedies (see p. 15). President Hoover, addressing the Chamber, promised to extend its unofficial efforts by ap pointing another of his famed Federal commissions (see p. 13).

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