THE FRENCH STOCKING.

Evening Post, Volume LXXIX, Issue 77, 2 April 1910, Page 10

THE FRENCH STOCKING.

According to a French financial paper, the wealth of France increased laft year by well over two hundred million pounds, the amount of the indemnity she had to pay to Germany after the war. A wonderful country! (says the St. James's Budget). A country which bore till the burden of that war, the destruction of life and property and the subsequent indemnity, without showing the least sign of bankruptcy. The Panama Canal carried off something like sixty millionr, of the peasants' savings, and ©till they toiled on, adding day by day to the little hoard in the stocking or the old coffeepot. They pay one-fifth of their wages aud profits away in taxes, but the littlepile under the mattress or in the farthermost recess of the dirk cupboard refuse* to stop growing. Added to other littlo piles all over the country, it provides immense loans for Rutwa. The national spirit was summed up by Napoleon's mother, who, on being remonstrated with for saving out of her allowance, replied: "Who knows whether all these kings will net some day come and beg from me?" And all this prosperity, to the immense astonishment of the Freetrader on the other side of tho Channel, continues under a regime of Protection, a regime which is at thic actual inomen* engaged in raising /till higher the wall which is to keep out goods from England, or else make them contribute to the pile in the coffee-pot. Meanwhile Kncfand lies helpless, tfhe s«es the wall rising, but can do nothing owing to her Cobdenite bond*. Any attempt at negotiation fails utterly. As an eminent diplomatist has put it, "it is like making war with an umbrella against a breechloader."