WHY PAY BILLS?

Evening Star, Issue 23326, 24 July 1939, Page 11

WHY PAY BILLS?

“ COLLECTING " IN FRANCE Nobody very jnucli likes paying, but everybody yields, with more or less good grace, to the machinery which his country, his social position, and the ago in which he lives have made customary for obliging him to pay. An understanding of the way in which this machinery differs in France and in England Is by no means an unimportant element in ihe mutual goodwill which is so vital between the two countries to-day. In England, if you are a tradesman and a man owes you money, you send him a bill, and if he fails, after several renewed applications, to send you the money by post, you threaten him with proceedings, you pass the matter to a debt collecting association, and eventually you sue him. In France, things do not happen like that. The first generally accepted principle is that if a man wants to collect money from you, the least he can do is to take the trouble to come personally to fetch it. The second is that when he does come, bringing with him a bill of which you have never previously bien presented with the details, or without having arranged or even announced the day and hour'of his visit, it is your duty to abandon whatever you may be doing, be it eating your lunch, in order to deal with him—(bat is (o say, In pay him.