﻿Slim Unburdens Himself 
By T-BONE SLIM 
 
Methinks the employer is worrying overmuch about the unemployment he has created. Possibly the unemployment was intended only as a temporary scare for the working class. Now it scares the employer. The employer, by the way, is the banker, Wall Street his prime chancellor . . . 
Roosevelt probably reasons employers created unemployment so now let them sit down and enjoy the fruits of their humor, and let them be not disturbed lest the lesson fails of sinking in. A revolution had occurred (1920) in industry and financiers took over––they today are guiding the destinies of production and barking all the orders. 
How can they bark! And industry is going f-fft. But there is another revolution on tap: 
Industry has ceased borrowing capital and it may be financiers will have to pick a grave for their pile down in 01’ Kentuck or engineer a war to absorb their surplus savings. 
Bankers put the railroads in the doghouse by wierd financing and even today Fido wonders. “what’s the big idea?”  
They even had Henry Ford on the griddle (good old Hank) and Henry, like a good boy that he is, hollered “Help!” “Murder!” “Mayhem!” with great presence of mind and it took practically all of us to drive the wolf away from Henry’s door. Henry hasn’t bought me so much as a cigar (or a box of snuff) for the noble part I played, to say nothing of sending me a late model Zephyr prepaid. 
Thus it is financiers and erstwhile employers are drawing cards to find out which shall be permitted to mismanage industry in a manner of their own wild and wooly choosing. Labor has thrown the matter into their hands and the only thing that stands between them and total oblivion is Madam Secretary Perkins.  
Wars are going on between labor leaders and they are scrambling to get in on the ground floor––different places however, and it is at this distance difficult to determine where the dance shall be held. 
However, this is not labor’s funeral, and seldom indeed it occurs that the chief mourner has heart failure at the obseques, for the tears are not real. 
No, I don’t think the chiselers can unite on a platform of totalitarianism. Counter music is already in and the big shots are counting their pennies and conserving their crumbs. The reason: you can’t eat crumbs and have them too. 
All right, rebels, back to bed! 

Yes, I suppose soup is all right––if it’s duck soup and the duck has reached a ripe old age. 
Social Service always rediscovers soup when they try to think of food––”soup to nuts” makes them that way. And once they hit upon soup they see great bodies of water, enough to float a battleship. 
Foggy stew, the boys call it. 
Now, you take a yellow turnip (rutabaga) it too is a fine food if properly excavated and stuffed with blue-point oysters . . . 
Ho, hum, there’s a big difference between tensile strength with tonsil strength––those afflicted with tonsil strength make the best hog-callers. 

City fireman died of heart failure shoveling snow. Man, 79, died of heart failure, as second thought, after having shoveled snow. 
Damme for a donkey if just thinking about snow doesn’t almost cause my heart to fail me. 
A man cannot be too cautous about laying his hand on a shovel in these trenchant times. Years ago we used to dig great tunnels and think nothing of it. 
No wonder they wrap things in cellophane so we won’t hurt our hands. 
“An emaciated band of 326 seafaring men came down the gang-plank of the British destroyer Cossack tonight to tell . . .”––P. A. Stalker. 
Hm, I have the picture before me (Daily News) and it shows the same “band” hale, hearty, and hilarious. Word-picture and photo-finish disagree. 
I’d hate to have P. A. describe Kate Smith and Elsa Maxwell when puffed up with saurkraut and kartoffels. 
Neutral nations are the worst sufferers in any man’s war, in no man’s sea––in the name of holy trade. Roll the snowballs and then have the brutes bust your spectacles. “What lunkheads we neutrals are,” as Shakespook spoke in 1603. 
War probably will not spread this spring or any other spring; neither will it end in autumn, for it is an economic war of attrition with a fashion all its own. News dispatches have the puny Russia hard on the heels of the powerful Finland. Nothing to it, it’s a wedge formation and much grief is in store. 
As St. Paul observed, what does it profit Stalin to win Leningrad and lose his martial Moscow?