PARIS AND THE FRANC

Shannon News, 19 February 1926, Page 2

PARIS AND THE FRANC

A FAMILY PARTY FROM MOSCOW A TROUNCING IN THE LORDS LONDON, Dec. 17. Ministers wear rather gloomy faces these days, notwithstanding that they are finding fair sailing through the parliamentary session, and now possess two proud diplomatic scalps in the Locarno Peace Pact and the Irish frontier settlement. They do not conceal from their friends that the developing crisis in French politics, and more particularly in French finance, causes the gravest anxiety in Downing j Street. Dum ardet Ucalegon still applies, now as it did in the days of Ancient Troy, or when the silver-voic-ed Latin poet sang of arms and heroes. One terrific example was the Great War, which proved as contagious as any plague. And the reactions of peace time, with nations that neighbour on each other suffering badI ly from high finance and low currency, are just as embarrassing. The situation across the Channel presents a puzzling aspect. It really I begins to look as though France had exhausted all her splendid patriotism I in the fury of the Great War, and had | none of the commodity left for, the I hardly less menacing problems of" today. While the franc literally burns and begins to bode the same dire calamity that overwhelmed the mark and the rouble, the politicians are fiddling with personal Jcuds and private jealousies. There are nowadays too many "careerists" among the Gallic statesmen. Cabinets are split over individual ambitions, and Ministers seem in capable of sinking themselves in the bigger destiny of France. Caillaux was recalled from exile and disgrace, deserved or not, to woi'k a financial miracle. And 1 certainly he began well. He was on the prospering road to make the Budgets balance and repay his country's debts, when he was kicked back into the abyss. Franc and Sovereign'.

I Others have suffered a similar fate, including- now even M. Loucheur, whose financial flair has since the war become almost as great a legend as Caillaux's. And every time the real snag has proved the same. Directly anyone .suggests that Praiice -should adopt those Spartan taxation courses which alone, can save the franc from perdition— r that the citoyens should really put their hands deep into their well-lined pockets—Nemesis stalks them like a flash of greased lightning. Our concern in these troubles is two r fold. The financial side is embarrassing enough. A headlong currency slump is a most infectious malady. If the French franc truly takes the plunge, the British sovereign may, without sharing 1 such a fate as that, begin to wobble awkwardly. Nor will Sttch a happening 1 across the Channel assist our struggling industry. But there is an even more alarming prospect on the purely political side. No sooner did France encounter the real storm, and the franc sink towards 1 its Polar zero, than some very illomened birds gathered in Paris, like bald-headed vultures round a foundered desert camel. It was something more than mere holiday coincidence that brought the Moscow gentry, in- \ eluding the subtle and suave M. Tchicherin, Russia's amazingly able and i unscrupulous Foreign Secretary, to the Quai d'Orsay. Not for nothing did these gloomy visitants flaunt enticingly before the faces of embarrassed French statesmen the illusive hope of a possible repayment of bankrupt Russian loans. Deep political schemes were camouflaged behind these cynical whispers. I hear that Tchicherin had actually the hard-fac-ed effrontery to endeavour by means of this sort of pressure on distressed France, to g-et her to squeeze out of Great Britain the Russian credits that we have thrice refused to a defaulting debtor who makes his default an article of his faith. Will they Meet? | The Soviet Foreign Secretary is even now loitering on in Paris, taking the pleasures of the gay city, with ah eye on Geneva. It seems to be his ambition, when Sir Austen Chamberlain passes through on -his way home from the Mosul discussions, to get a little private confab with the British Foreign Secretary. It would be a truly interesting meeting. But the Machiavellian Tchicherin would find, behind the monocle of Sir Austen, a cold blue eye that might irritate him as much as the De Vere gaze annoyed Robert Browning. There would, I imagine, be "nothing- doing on the Western front." Because nobody is better aware than our Foreign Secretary how assiduous are the mischievous meddlings of Moscow all over the globe against the British interests. While speaking smooth things and cadging loans the Moscow fraternity never relax their plotting and intriguing in the highways and byeways of international diplomacy. They are working like ants out in the Far East to precipitate a colossal upheaval in China. They have their agents, liberally supplied with plundered funds, in the Sudan and in Persia. And they are still engineering for all they are worth what proletarian trouble they ( may in the United Kingdom. Nothing} In history can equal their contempt for our intelligence. Even while Tchic- J herin and his associates have been |

speaking the plausible word in Paris and Berlin • their Moscow compeers have been on the "war" with which their efforts threaten Britain on her own hearth!

Birkenhead Busy. This slight survey of events abroad is justified by the importance of denouements that we may witness very soon. And there is little here in London that bears much digression this week. The Irish boundax'y agreement received prompt Parliamentary sanction, but not even now without' some grumbling murmurs from those Tory Die Hard,? who cannot see how 'peace in Ireland is essential to seour- i

ity in the Empire. Lord Birkenhead, who is reported to have, fought a bitter fight in the Cabinet to carry the agreement through against these in-, transigeants, emptied the vials of his bottled wrath upon one unlucky legal peer. This was the nobleman who, in his House of Commons days, wa~s known as Mr.' Butcher, K.C., and always in the van of every Die Hard battle. He wept acid tears over the Government's Irish policy, and then Lord Birkenhead descended upon him, smiting him hip and thigh. Perhaps the fact that his victim was a lawyer, and temperamentally incompatible, rendered the Earl's onslaught the more scathing. Never have their lordships listened to quite such a brutal dressing down within the august precincts of a chamber where the lotus blooms and everybody usually appears to be wearing fashionplate deportment. Lord Birkenhead's contempt found its deepest expression, perhaps, when he sketched what might have occurred had there been no Irish agreement, and pictured the former Mr. Butcher, K.C., "still maundering" about "the state of Ireland!" In the Commons we have had lively tariff reform debates, hinged on the Government's proposals under the Safeguarding Act. The Liberals and the Labour men, always excepting tho red-hot Communists, who ai*e also red- ' hot protectionists, fought these pro-

j jects hard and Jong. "Tariff reform on the instalment plan" was their cry. ; But Sir Philip Cunliffe Lister, for thti | Board of Trade, never lost his joyous smile. And he had a deadly tuquoque ready. Why seek to alter the title of this legislation, he asked. A rose by any other name would smell as sweet. This was precisely the same rosebud that Mr. Lloyd George formerly wore so gaily in his buttonhole I What can any earnest disciple of Adam Smith do with a man like that?