BUSINESS AS USUAL.

Northern Advocate, 28 August 1919, Page 6

BUSINESS AS USUAL.

GERMANS BACK IN PARIS,

RE-OPEN SHOPS AND CAFES,

Mr Burr Price, the special correspondent of the New York Herald in Paris, tells the following indignant and surprising story of the conditions in that capital. He writes:—Mysteriously, steadily, brazenly in defiance of a law of the land, the Germans are re-appearing in Paris. They are living without disguise in the capital still technically an armed camp of war. In greater number, in bolder manner, they are living in the outly■ing districts, just beyond the fortii fixations.

They are resuming the proprietorship of small cafes—as by magic they are popping up with smiles behind the little zinc bars from which they disappeared so precipitately in 1914. Whence came they? Have they been hiding in their own wine cellavs throughout the last four years?

They are renewng the direction (*f small restaurants, where sauerkraut once was the "speeialite de la mai-! son" go into the kitchens now and there you will find the perspiring Teutons. Have they been hiding behind their stoves during the war? RE-ENGAGING IN TRADE. They are re-opening corner grocery stores—only that's not the name for them in France—and little businesses of all sorts. They are now freely engaging in the supply trade —it has been found that through out the long hostilities many Germans who had succeeded in remaining in French territory had plied their business of furnishing war material to the army. Scorn for such traitorous swine who would sell death-pro-ducing stuff for use against their own countrymen is minimised by astonishment at the laxity of the French Government in permitting them such a practice. For the last few weeks Paris city officials have been investigating the presence of so many Germans, and it has been found that while a few have .been in their old haunts without molestation from the police during the war period the greater number have been drifting in through the Swiss fronter since the signing of the armistice. When announcement of this state of affairs was made public there was naturally a wild cry in Paris papers for the immediate expulsion of these enemy residents and adoption by the Chamber of Deputies of laws similar to those being passed in England regarding the presence there of Germans. At present the hands of the police ! are completely tied by the fact that 99 per cent of the Germans who remained or have been drifting back are naturalised as Frenchmen, and the Chamber, with characteristic procrastination, keeps putting off passage of the proper measuers to take this naturalsation from the Germans and permit the police to oust them. An illuminating article was published in the "Liberte" the other evening, signed H. Galli. "One wonders at finding in the midst of the entrenched camp of Paris so many enemy subjects," he says. "There have never been at any time so many foreigners n Paris. I do not mean visitors here temporarily but people stopping here permanently, doing business, exploiting enterprises, and all too often taking the jobs of mobilised Frenchmen. Nothing has been done to keep these undesirable citizens from the country. 171,000 ALIENS. "In December, 1914, Mr Lauren!, who was then Prefect of Police, stated that 150,000 aliens were settled in the capital. To-day, according to the official figure, there are 171,000. The great majority stay here without authorisation. The special commission named to investigate foreigner?

and issue permits for residence has j been unable to pass upon more than 38,000 cases. Three thousand permissions were granted, and the same number refusals were made. "Those who did not get the proper permits succeeded in staying, anyway, despite all measures taken to pat accomplished by disappearing for a accomplished by disappearing for a short time and returning to the same address, or changing their residence and failing to register. About 100 who practised these deceptions were caught and sent to concentration camps, and another hundred were escorted to the frontiers. "The most undesirable often avoided detection and investigation. What risk did they run? None at all. Propositions to alter the statf of affairs which existed throughout the war are getting dusty in the files of the Ministers and specials commissions." Those figures on the number of foreigners living in Pari3 during the war, and the number of them officially approved, will be interesting fot Americans who have been through the ordeal of getting matriculation papers, permits to live temporarily, certificates of domicile, and other little-scraps of ■paper. It strikes mo that the French police are a bit over- ' zealous in cataloguing good, honest Americans—people from home, I know, were most scrupulous in appearing before the proper authorities —while thouetands of real undesirables were roaming around unticketed, unmolested. TIPS FOR BIG BERTHA. As I write this I am getting up a real case of post-war peevishness about the hours I spent in the line at the Commissary of Police, with a handful of photographs, and a mouthful of newly-learned French phrases. I am certain that there were enough policemen assigned to the central police bureau to keep me in my proper place in that line to have found one of the Germans who, according to recent statements, were in the city in great numbers at that time. The peevishness grows when I reI call a visit to my room one morning by a special detective who had with him a dossier concerning me, and who didn't leave the place till he had gone over every detail five or six times. Then I got a little bit madder in thinking of the number of times I was stopped last summer while hastening through the streets ibetween those 20-minute Bertha shells—stopped and made to show my papers proving I wasn't a German spy, and now it develops that all the time there were hundreds and hundreds of real German spies loitering around and most probably furnishing their Government with information on the "point of fall" of the long-range shells I was trying to avoid. At the time the Bertha was firing there was much speculation on whether or not the Germans got quick indication of the accuracy of their aim, and it doesn't seem at all improbable that with such a large number of their brother Germans here they had a good working information bureau. Each day now the French papers publish short dispatches from England reporting the progress of measures designed to eliminate Germans from the island, and flaunting the progress in the face of the Chamber in an endeavour to bring about speedy action. French people with whom I have talked declare positively they will never again have anything to do with a German tradesman. They desira that all naturalisation papers be taken from the enemy subjects, and that the authorities immediately banish them, Ibut despite this general feeling it is hard to convince a deputy of the wisdom of passing a bill which has been presented.