Surprise after Surprise

Several dozen Frenchmen decided last week that no stigma of default should attach to them. They would pay their share of the $19.000,000 which La Pa trie did not pay on Dec. 15 to les yanquis. Seizing paper & pencil they divided the 480,000,000-franc default by the population of France, 41,000,000, figured that each owed the U. S. between eleven and twelve francs (about 47-c-), popped this tidy sum into an envelope and mailed it to U. S. Ambassador Walter Evans Edge. Mr. Edge wrote letters to the several dozen Frenchmen, thanked them, returned their money. Other Frenchmen wrote denunciatory letters. In Montparnasse a mob knocked out the front teeth of a Dr. Daniel Mahoney of San Francisco, who won a Croix de Guerre in the war.

Meanwhile gallant Premier-reject Edouard Herriot, who went down fighting for payment to the U. S. when the Chamber overthrew his Cabinet (TIME, Dec. 26), received last week the most flabbergasting surprise of his life. As M. Herriot said not long ago: "Half the skill of being Premier of France lies in knowing how to fall!" but last week he learned that he need not have fallen, need never have raised the debt issue in the Chamber, need not have worried about it all those months. . . .

By mere chance Citizen Herriot picked up a copy of the 1932 budget which passed the Chamber under Premier Pierre Laval last February and passed the Senate under M. Laval's successor Premier Andre Tardieu. Thumbing through this ancient document--which dates from before the death of Aristide Briand (TIME, March 14); before the French general election which made M. Herriot premier; before the assassination of President Paul Doumer and the election of his successor President Albert Lebrun (TIME, May 16) --thumbing through the hoary pages of the bygone budget, M. Herriot came upon an item of 480,000,000 francs. There it stood in black and white! Nine months ago the Chamber & Senate scrupulously appropriated the whole sum necessary to pay the U. S. on Dec. 15.

Useless to ask questions of the man who drew up the budget! He, debonair M. Francois Pietri. Minister of the Budget in the Laval Cabinet, not only forgot--believe it or not--his handiwork completely but rushed to Premier Herriot's aid in the Chamber debate fortnight ago, delivered an elegant harangue asking his fellow Deputies to "vote this payment for the honor of France."

Pay Now? Mais Non! Despite Citizen Herriot's big discovery, his successor Premier Joseph Paul-Boncour made no move to pay last week. True, payment had been voted ten months ago but equally clear was the fact that the Chamber in its vote last fortnight "invited" the French Government to "defer"' payment. This invitation Maitre Paul-Boncour, one of the great lawyers of France, felt bound to accept. His program speech to the Chamber was a lawyer's masterpiece. Barely mentioning the general debt issue and skimming over France's default of the payment currently due, Orator Paul-Boncour led his hearers off down such rambling bypaths as: "This depression is not only economic but psychological in character, made up of international uneasiness, misunderstanding and rivalries. ... In Hungary food is cheap, but in Austria only unorganized labor is cheap. It hardly needed National Socialist attacks on Jewish merchants, such as the throwing of tear-gas bombs in one of the biggest Vienna department stores, to discourage Christmas shopping.

"The governments as well as the shoppers of Southeast Europe are beginning to count pennies. Repentance, however, has come late. The amounts spent by the Bethlen Government of Hungary, without Parliamentary authorization, on officers' polo grounds, hunting grounds, civil air service, summer resorts and gorgeous tuberculosis homes were actually greater than the sum France has just refused to pay the United States.

"Despite recent reductions, the sums set aside in Southeast European budgets for armaments are large enough. None say, however, how large the sums really are. In a lecture at Budapest this week, in which he discussed the value of a prewar budget analysis for espionage purposes, Field Marshal Urbansky, chief of the Intelligence Service of Austria-Hungary, declared that since the beginning of the disarmament discussions armament expenditures had been so camouflaged in post-war budgets that not even the spending governments knew the totals."

Charmed by the new Premier's fluent, actor-like diction the Chamber of Deputies gave him a vote of confidence 365-0-215. With this triumph won, Premier Paul-Boncour paid a surprise call on Ambassador Edge, courteously expressed his hope that sooner or later Herbert Hoover or Franklin Delano Roosevelt will be empowered by Congress to negotiate a brand new settlement of Europe's debts.

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