French Leave
That a Prime Minister of France should leave Paris. for the United States immediately after securing, by a mere thirty-one votes, the support of the Assembly for a measure to keep the Treasury afloat with a loan of 80,000 million francs from the Bank of France, is one of those recurrent illogicalities of French politics that the world must, presumably, try to get used to. But it is very difficult to do that when it is remem- bered that doubts about the ability of the French Treasury to meet its commitments have been common for more than three months—a period, it so happens, longer than the life of the present Government. What is more, M. Mayer, the present Prime Minister, was himself Finance Minister in the preceding Government of M. Pinay and was trying to over- come this precise difficulty of shortage of funds at the time when that Government fell. This fact might entitle him to try to shame the Assembly which blocked his way then and was still trying to block it before he got his way on Tuesday night, but it is also a shocking reminder of the very small dis- tance his Government has been able to travel in the financial field in the past three months.
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