Evening Post. TUESDAY, MARCH 23, 1926. THE FALLING FRANC

Evening Post, Volume CXI, Issue 70, 23 March 1926, Page 6

Evening Post. TUESDAY, MARCH 23, 1926. THE FALLING FRANC

The fears of France have not only survived the reconciliation with her traditional enemy which was effected at Locarno, but, if the information cabled to-day on the authority of the "Daily Express" is not misleading, have survived in such strength that the disarmament for which the Locarno Conference was to prepare the way may be postponed "sine die." France is thankful to have the guarantee of Britain and Italy against German aggression, but though in armaments she is at present the strongest and Germany the weakest of all the Great Powers, France is said to be unwilling to consider any scheme of reduction which does not take into account the relative fecundity of the nations, their industrial prospects, and their capacities for chemical research. If after about a fortnight of wire-pulling and wrangling, of bluff and threat and entreaty, the Council of the League of Nations had to leave unsolved the problem of Germany's admission to the League on which all the Great Powers were unanimous, how long it would take the Council or any other tribunal to reduce the. armaments of Europe by a single gun if the solution of such an appalling calculus as this is to be a condition precedent 1 It seems probable that the millennium will nave arrived by other means before it will have been helped forward an inch on these terms. We need not wonder that two of the strongest League of Nations men in their respective countries —Lord Cecil and M. Boncour—have quarrelled over the French proposal to apply these extraordinary tests. It is. exceedingly unfortunate that while in this direction France should be looking so far ahead for trouble as to make any alleviation of present troubles almost impossible, she should be showing herself so blind to a peril which is far more serious than any that Germany could contrive against her for years to come, and of which the control is entirely within her own power. The falling mark made an immense addition to the miseries of Germany after the War, and for some months seriously aggravated the economic troubles and the political unrest of Europe as a whole. Germany has since emerged from-her slough of despondency and is working her way to stability and solvency. It is not the falling mark but the falling franc that is now a danger to Europe, and the trouble is far more obviously within local control than was that of Germany. France is solvent, but Germany was not. France is even prosperous, not only far more prosperous than Germany has ever been since the War, but more prosperous than Britain. Despite the devastation of the provinces which were occupied by the German forces and which have made so powerful and so just an appeal to the imagination of the world, France has had no social evil comparable to the stagnation of Britain's trade and " the standing army of more than a million unemployed which her depressed industries and grossly overburdened taxpayers have to maintain. One reason for the contrast is, of course, that while Britain is paying her way, France is not. The prosperity of France bears some resemblance to j that of the man who, in spite of hard' times, continues to enjoy himself as freely as before, and makes .up the difference by paying in promissory notes instead of cash. Never since the War has a French Budget been made to balance. A fictitious balance has been arrived at by the imaginary asset of German reparations to which successive Ministers of Finance resorted in order to save themselves from the unpleasant alternative of making themselves unpopular by imposing the taxation that was necessary to effect a real balance. It was in order to realise this "imaginary asset that M. Poincare sent a French army into the Ruhr, but the soldier proved, as usual, a very costly tax collector, and neither by military force nor by the moral force of the Dawes Plan does France now expect to find her financial salvation in the money she can get from Germany. Slowly and painfully she seems at last to be realising that she must look to herself just as she did before the War, and that the cure for the embarrassments in which incessant borrowing involved her finances is not more borrowing, but more taxation. The nation appears to have apprehended this fact, but to be still powerless to make its apprehension effective. The franc continues to fall, and with it every Finance Minister who ventures to recommend the only kind of measure that'can arrest the process. France tried no less than six Finance Ministers last year, and found them all wanting. Some were sacrificed to their merits and their strength, and some to their weakness. M. de Monzie lasted only a few days, and M. Loucheur a little more than a fortnight. M. Caillaux, who was the strongost of them all, was almost as helpless as M. Doumer, who was probably the weakest. The appointment of M. Doumer was explained by the "Manchester Guardian's" correspondent on the principle that as all the first-

rate and even second-rate men had been tried it was time for a nonentity to have a turn. We cannot pretend to have kept count of all of the alternative proposals submitted by M. Doumer or of the-number of his defeats. If he defied the confident prophecies of an early doom by holding on for three whole months it was because he seemed to thrive upon defeat as none of his predecessors had done. When M. Doumer went the whole of the Ministry went with him, and at the most inconvenient moment possible. "Ours is an awful profession," said M. Briand, as he took "the train of all the talents" to Geneva, deprived of the power to represent France on the very eve of the fateful meetings of the Council and the Assembly of the League. Yet he has had the courage to form another Ministry, and the welcome that it has received illustrates the rewards which a grateful country so often showers upon his "awful profession." The franc, we were told yesterday, had established a new low record —137.75 to £I—which1 —which is attributed to the general political situation. It is a deficit of five milliards of francs that M. Peret has to face, and as he proposes fresh taxation to meet it his stay will surely be brief.