NE WS OF THE WEEK.
rilHE wine crisis in the South of France does not become less 1- acute. The Mayors and municipalities are resigning office daily throughout the coast Departments, and at this rate ordinary civic life will be brought to a standstill shortly just as M. Marcelin Albert threatened. The Mayors, according to the Paris correspondent of the Times, flaunt their badge of office before enthusiastic crowds, and then "consign it to the funeral pyre." At Narbonne the entrance to the town ball has been walled up as though the place were a mausoleum of dead hopes. The Committee of Argeliers which directs the strike calls upon lea leder& (an ill-omened word, as the Times correspondent remarks) for a blind obedience. Apparently the Committee aims at constructing an irre- sponsible oligarchy on the ruins of regular administration. At Narbonne a regiment has refused to obey its officers in controlling the crowd. But this is not probably an instance of revolutionary anti-militarism, as the regiment is recruited in the Narbonne district, and the men are refusing specifically to use arms against their friends and relations. Meanwhile the Chamber of Deputies discusses means of checking the adulteration of wine without apparently believing that adulteration is the root of the evil, and M. Clemenceau has addressed a letter of protest to the Mayors, whose resignations be refuses to accept.
