PARLIAMENTARY DEGENERACY IN FRANCE.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLVI, Issue 14209, 4 November 1909, Page 4

PARLIAMENTARY DEGENERACY IN FRANCE.

M. Raymond Poincare, ex-Minister for Finance, Senator and Academician,, is one of the most respected members of the French political World," and „any speech by him is a pronouncement which carries weight throughout the country. He was recently at Belfort, where he presided over the fetes which are now being held there" by . the Federation of Employers' Unions, _ and among other things he referred, in a remarkable passage' of his speech, to the causes and the remedies of the growing unpopularity of the Lower House, which, as he said, has tended more and more of late years "to make the boundaries .of France the space confined within the limits of the Palais Bourbon, the precincts of the Luxembourg, and the Ministerial antechambers." He proceeded :—"Some Frenchmen become deputies as they might become lawyers or doctors, or even cooks and domestic servants, simply in order to have a good place and to try to keep it. The professional politicians; constitute a serious danger. The deputy's obligations to his electors have become more and more numerous arid burdensome until now they are paralysing the most independent minds. A comparison of the present with the past of -10 or 15 years ago reveals, even in the constituencies which have been the least affected, the lowering of political morals and the progress of political mendicity. The most eniinent men, the strongest characters, are bound to undergo at certain moments the cruel pressure of local interests. Everybody agrees that an end must be put to such a humiliating state of things, a situation so pernicious for the good work* ing of administrative and governmental machinery and one so fatal for the Parliamentary regime. Unfortunately, opinions differ as to the remedy. I have, for my part, a profound and long-standing conviction on the subject, and I am sure that we shall continue to go from bad to worse if We do not decide radically to reform our electoral system, to broaden the basis of representation, to abolish: the shifting injustice of government by mere majorities, and to seek loyally in proportional representation a faithful reproduction of all French'opinions. . I only hope that those Republicans who object -to these necessary solutions may decide to adopt them before electoral corruption has completed the work it has already begun, and has, perhaps, rendered disasters inevitable."