NIBBLES ABOUT FRANCE.

Digger (Invercargill RSA), Issue 30, 8 October 1920, Page 4

NIBBLES ABOUT FRANCE.

(By Robert Dell).

"MY SECOND COUNTRY (FRANCE)."

There is nothing that most Frenchmen like so much as to break a law. Love'of mon.ey is one of the^chief weaknesseg of the French, at least of the bour. geois' and the peasants. During the whole of my twelve years' residence in Paris I have never heard of a sanitary inspector, much less had a visit from one. A Freinffiman spenda half his life in signing papers, apparently for no object but that of providing easy employment fb-r an army of otherwise useless officials. French business methods are just about a century behind the times. French administration is a centralised hureaucracy which spreads its tentacles over the whole country, controls the life of the people through its agents, discouraging individual initiative and enforcing an arid uniformity. In Paris about 30 per cent. of the children are born illegitimate. Paris is strarigely unlike the rest of France and the Parisian is a fype apart, very different from other Frenchmen. Ho that knows only Paris does not know France. The police are intensely unpopular in France, even with honest people, and in many cas^s people will suffer an injustice or a wrong rather than resort to them, such is the suspicion with which they are regarded. I do not think that there is an exexample in history of a nation which, having been forced to go to war in selfdefence, has been content to stop at selfdefence and to end the war when it had repelled the attack. Probably in no country is the level of individual intelligence so high as in France ; certainly in none is the interest in intellectual matters so widespread. French conservatism extends to most of the practical matters of life. No people is more open to new ideas or more suspicious of new methods. The whole of French literature in the nineteenth century from Balzac to Anatole France is filled with example® oi the meanness and avarice produced by small property, G.uy de Maupassant and Emile Zola have shown us what small property has done for the character of the peasants, Octave Mirabeau has exposed with bitter irony the avidity and hypocrisy to be found among the bourgeois. The total ignorance of economic questions, for example, that one finds even among French men of high intelligence and great knowledge is astonishing. Nowhere is that ignorance more general than among politicians ; not one of the most prominent men in French politics outside the Socialist party, except M. Caill^ux, has any real knowledge of economics or seems to pay much attention to them. M. Clemenceau is a case in point. His greatest admirer would not venture to say that he ever grasped even the elementary data of an economic problem or ever thought it worth while to try to do so; his attitude towards such proHems is purely romantic and literary. After thirteen years' experience cf France it is my deliberate conviction that private property in the means of production is even more pernicious when it is distributed in many hands than when it is concentrated in a few. The ^ French public has no confidence in the adffiinistration of justice . . . its want of confidence is fully justified. The French criminal procedure is quite literally mediaeval — it is, in fact, the system of the Inquisition almost unchanged. In theory, French, like English, law presumes an accused person to be innocent until he is proved to be guilty ; in practice, French judges assume him to be guilty until he has proved himself to be innocent. Bail is seldom granted in Fraonce, and detention is deliberately used as a means of pressuxe on an accused person in the hope that he will finally inculpat© himself. ' That Anatole France was right in saying that the true France is the France of Yoltaire is my firm conviction. Voltaire wa® the typical Frenchman of the best kind with the typical French qualities and weaknesse^