"Hospitality!"

The Rt. Hon. Winston Churchill, dynamic Conservative elder statesman and great British friend of France, conferred in Paris last week with Premier Leon Blum and other high French leaders. On his return to London he conferred by special invitation with Lord Halifax, the new pro-German British Foreign Secretary.

At noon March 19, at the select Paris restaurant Laperouse, the Rt. Hon. David Lloyd George, dynamic Liberal elder statesman and great British friend of France, arrived carrying two large military maps. He lunched and conferred, it came out last week, with this curious assortment of Right and Centre French politicians : Georges Bonnet, until recently Finance Minister and before that Ambassador at Washington; Paul Reynaud, also a former Finance Minister and frequently mentioned as a future Rightist Premier; Georges Mandel, the famed "Tiger Cub" disciple of the late Georges ("Tiger") Clemenceau; and Jean Ybarnegaray, a lieutenant of Fascist Colonel Count Frangois de La Rocque.

The same military maps went with Mr. Lloyd George a few days later to his conferences with Premier Leon Blum and Foreign Minister Joseph Paul-Boncour. This week the E. Phillips Oppenheim nature of these activities was raised to the nth degree when Lloyd George, who had sped from Paris to London, sped back to

Paris. "France looks to us to come to her aid if attacked--therefore she cannot offend us!" wailed Lloyd George in his only open statement of the week. "His Majesty's Government are taking a mean advantage of her predicament in preventing her from doing for her friends in the Democracy of Spain what Mussolini and Hitler are doing so lavishly for her enemies!"

"By Our Own Means!" Meanwhile last week the liner President Roosevelt cleared from Manhattan for Le Havre, France, with her holds jampacked and her decks stacked with lashed-on piles of heavy motor trucks and tractors easily convertible into tanks. The Spanish Leftist consul would neither deny nor confirm that all this was bound for Barcelona via Le Havre, but Leftist Manhattan dockworkers openly jubilated as they loaded the President Roosevelt, declared some of the equipment was lettered in Spanish. Should a "pirate submarine" sink the President Roosevelt, Spanish observers felt this would have its effect on U. S. public opinion.

To ask that present huge emergency shipments to Leftist Spain be stopped in France is asking a great deal of Leon Blum. Therefore 1,000,000 French War veterans through their national organization petitioned President Albert Lebrun to make exceptional use of the Presidential powers and himself head a "French Cabinet of Public Safety"--i.e. kick out the Blum Popular Front cabinet. In prompt retort the William Green of French Labor, portly Leon Jouhaux, announced in the name of 5,000,000 unionized workmen that if the Popular Front Cabinet falls "we will go the limit to set it up again--BY OUR OWN MEANS!"

In the Chamber of Deputies the Popular Front majority showed fight, provoked pandemonium and suspension of the session by invalidating the recent election of Rightist Jean Goy. Screamed angry Rightists, "There is no more Chamber!", but soon it was sitting again.

35,000 Sitters-Leon Blum, facing the continued sit-down of 35,000 workers in the vital metal-working plants of France, faced also a barrage of Leftist assertions that what the sitting workers wanted was for France openly to aid Leftist Spain. The Premier let it be known that he was receiving many letters from French workers who complained that they were sitting solely at the behest of proletarian leaders, wished to resume work. A break came when 800 sitdowners in the Ferodo plant announced that they accepted Government arbitration, got up and went to work. At week's end the Premier announced, perhaps prematurely, that the 34,200 remaining sitters and their employers had reached a "basis of accord," that this week they will be working again. The keynote of the Blum entourage was sounded meanwhile with tremendous fanfare by the new Propaganda Minister, the first France has ever had, M. Ludovic Oscar Frossard.

"We have no desire to trouble the relations between peoples!" clarioned Frossard with the full-throated oratorical finesse of a Goebbels. "We have no ideologies to set forth and no desire to interfere with the internal affairs of other countries. France respects whatever regime each country has found to be best suited to its needs!

"France repudiates wholeheartedly the odious prejudices of color and race! She welcomes all friendly foreigners who desire to visit or live in her country and it is the business of the Ministry of Propaganda to give them hospitality and help them enjoy the advantages that France has to offer!"

Doom of Blum? This week the Premier, who has been stalling nervously along ever since the French Senate refused to vote temporary financial measures which would have enabled his Cabinet to keep going for three months, abruptly challenged the conservative Senate by demanding for his Popular Front Cabinet sweeping, totalitarian fiscal powers.

The Senate wants to grant these to a National Union Cabinet, but not one headed by a Socialist such as Blum whose "New Deal" mentality the Senators dislike. The Chamber is favorable to Blum. As debate began the franc rose on international exchange as Paris financiers predicted the Senate would now throw down the present second Blum Cabinet as it did the first. This would call the bluff of Leon Jouhaux & French Labor, if it was a bluff last week, if not then the proletariat "by our own means" must attempt to keep the Popular Front Cabinet in power.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.