I take this to mean that the intelligent -- and therefore necessarily cynical? - liberal considers that the need for a national economy with controls that will assure his conception of social justice is so great that individual and local liberties as well as democratic processes may have to yield before it. This seems like an attitude favoring a sort of totalitarian bureaucracy which, under a President of the same stamp, would try to coerce an uncooperative Congress or Supreme Court. As for states' rights, they have never counted in the thinking of my liberal friends except as irritations of a minor and immoral nature which exist now only as anachronisms.

The American liberal may, in the world of to-day, have a strong case; but he presents it publicly so enmeshed in hypocrisy that it is not an honest one. Why, in the first place, call himself a liberal if he is against laissez-faire and favors an authoritarian central government with womb-to-tomb controls over everybody? If he attaches little importance to personal liberty, why not make this known to the world? And if he is so scornful of the rights of states, why not advocate a different sort of constitution that he could more sincerely support?

I am concerned here, however, with the Northern liberal's attitude toward the South. It appears to be one of intense dislike, which he makes little effort to conceal even in the presence of Southern friends. His assumption seems to be that any such friends, being tolerable humans, must be more liberal than most Southerners and therefore at least partly in sympathy with his views. Time's editor, Thomas Griffith, in his book, The Waist High Culture, wrote: ``most of what was different about it (the Deep South) I found myself unsympathetic to.'' This, for the liberals I know, would be an understatement. Theirs is no mere lack of sympathy, but something closer to the passionate hatred that was directed against Fascism.