In France

One M. Fiquet, brisk pater familias and councilor of the Folie-Mericourt precinct of the Department of the Seine, suddenly became alarmed lest Parisian schoolchildren had not enough time to consume the formidable French mid-day meal. So he appealed to the Prefect of the Seine, M. Juillard, grizzled repository of safety and welfare.

The paternal prefect immediately ordered a referendum of the worried families of the 260,000 schoolchildren of Paris. The present school-hours are 8:30 to 11:30 a. m. and 1 to 4 p. m. Was the hour and a half lunch-hour satisfactory to the mama and papa or little Jacques or Suzanne? Where papa was a workman he said "Mais non!" He came home at 12. Why should his children come home half an hour earlier? The working classes voted solidly for a 12 to 2 lunch-hour, giving papa a chance to see his child and the child a chance to eat and digest the daily pot-au-feu, broth with huge chunks of sour Parisian bread. A strong minority voted to continue the present system. Thirty thousand families did not vote at all. Teachers became alarmed lest they should be required to work more than their statutory six hours a day. There were present all the ingredients of a seething, insoluble, good French row.

Were MM. Fiquet and Juillard perplexed? Pas de tout. Fiquet had an inspiration--a zoning system. Let the children of the poor eat with their families from 12 to 2. Let the children of the middle-classes eat from 11:30 to 1:30. Sensible, intricate, flexible, the system to be evolved will pay obeisance to the chief gods of the French bureaucracy: omnipresent paternalism, involved elaboration of red tape, with a strong substratum of invaluable commonsense.