Letters

to the Editor

No Surer Path

Editor, The Wall Street Journal:

There is something vastly more impor­tant to the preservation of America’s free institutions than the morals or the merits of any public man or men. It is the degree of their observance or their defiance, when high in office, of the Constitution of the United States. That great instrument im­poses upon its three departments of govern­ment exclusive obligations and independent powers. Among these is the right and duty of the Legislature to investigate the conduct of the Executive officers, high and low, and if need be and in their judgment to impeach them and to put them on trial for alleged misconduct or default.

Pursuant to this duty, now in the current scene as often in the past, the United States Senate has set up a committee of its mem­bers especially charged to obtain information concerning Communist or other disloyal pene­tration into the Executive Department. Two great heads of this department by executive order have forbidden their subordinates to give this committee of the Legislative De­partment access to information contained in the executive files concerning the manner and extent of the known Communist penetra­tion into places of honor and trust and re­sponsibility within that department.

This defiance of the right and the power of the Legislature in the performance of an express and essential duty prescribed for it by the Constitution far transcends in im­portance and is a vastly greater danger to our tripartite form of government with its safeguards against executive autocracy than the personal behavior or alleged misconduct of any public officer or body while acting within his or its constitutional duty as ex­pressly prescribed. There is no surer path to complete executive autocracy than this.

Spencer Heath

Sewanee, Tenn.

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/Comment to Spencer MacCallum:/ The trouble is, I don’t believe in that, and I only played in character with the politically minded people.