TOPICS OF THE DAY
THE DANGER IN FRANCE
THE perils which beset a nation that refuses to put its hand in its pocket and pay its bills have reached a very dramatic stage in France. There is ominous talk about ending the Parliamentary system, about finding men who " know how to rule " and, above all and most naturally of all (for the cry in such circumstances is generally for " a Man "), about a dictatorship. The French have always been much more apt than Englishmen to blame the rulers as a class. The reason is probably because they are more suspicious, or, to put it in a different and rather more agreeable way, because their habits and talents dispose them to an imaginative political thinking which is beyond the range of British phlegm. " There's nothing either right or wrong but thinking makes it so "—and Frenchmen's thoughts will supply all, and more than, the evidence they need that somebody or something they dislike is wrong. Englishmen have frequently laid the blame on individuals, and they have also laid the blame on systems, but they have never laid the blame on a whole class as incompetent in method and dishonest in intention. In France, as we know, " We are betrayed ! " long ago became almost a traditional cry.
This time it is not the generals but the whole class of deputies who are said to be betraying the nation. We hold no brief for the deputies, but we think that they are being a little hardly used. The truth is that they are neither better nor worse than they have been for a long time. As most of them are poor men it is no doubt true that they arc extremely anxious to remain deputies ; and, particularly in these very hard times, they are under particularly in these very hard times they are under Parliamentary salaries, meanwhile dressing up a personal motive to look like a patriotic or high political one. Nobody under such conditions could search a deputy's heart and determine justly what is strong or weak in it and what good or bad. The deputy probably does not know that himself. If we search for the truth that lies on the surface, and we are not concerned to do snore than that, we should say that the long-established refusal of the French people to tolerate adequate direct taxation is the only explanation that is needed of the present distress.
Time, that great ironist, has added to her mighty paradoxes by making the present crisis in France a complete reversal in form of the taxation troubles which brought about the French Revolution. At the end of the eighteenth century the workers on the land paid 80 per cent. of their earnings, and it was their grievances under seignorial oppression that feed the revolutionary spirit. Now:all that is changed. It is the peasants who come off easily under modern taxation and the lower middle classes, containing a much larger element of small independent persons than in England, who are groaning under the taxes that are successfully collected. The illuminating Paris correspondent of the Manchester Guardian points out that the annual income of French agriculture is estimated at sixty milliards of francs. Its annual net profit for the purpose of taxation is officially put at one and a-half milliards, yet the yield in taxation is a miserable forty-three millions of francs. The wages and salaries of clerks and workmen, on the other hand, amount to only ten milliards, yet these people pay to the Treasury nearly 245 millions of francs. One hardly ever hears sucitt things mentioned in the Chamber or the Senate-- and the Senate powerfully represents the interests of the peasantry. It is usually the Senate, of course, that puts its foot down most heavily upon financial reform.
The average Englishman asks with astonishment, and he may well do so, why the Income Tax law— Income Tax being the most easily collected and the most just of all taxes, painful though it be—is not enforced in France. The French Income Tax is severe in theory, but in practice it is extremely indulgent. There is whole- sale evasion. The Manchester Guardian correspondent says that if the tax were strictly applied it would yield £300,000,000 instead of the £60,000,000 which it now yields.
A month ago M. Painleve estimated that the deficit in the Budget was £30,000,000. To-day it is said to be nearly £50,000,000. There have been supplementary estimates for the wars in Moscow and Syria, and these account for a considerable part of the increase ; but there are other reasons. Whenever there is inflation there is a consequent rise in prices, and all the Civil Servants demand and receive a corresponding increase of salary. Again, fresh borrowing from the Bank of France causes an increase in the cost of the Debt service. Thus inflation, while it partly, but only for a short time.
gets over a difficulty, soon aggravates the troubles it was designed to meet. It makes higher expenditure than ever necessary and the franc continually falls in sympathy and, one might also say, in protest. M; Loucheur, M. Briand's Minister of Finance, has introduced simultaneously no fewer than seven Finance Bills, and the situation when we write is that all the Bills have been turned down by the Finance Committee. M: Loucheur has resigned. Meanwhile the short period for which the last borrowing was sufficient is running out.
The anxiety throughout France is indicated by the multiplicity of new movements, mostly hot-headed, and of fantastical expedients for saving France by any other means than by meeting the bill in the ordinary way. We hear of a new union sacree, of societies of young Fascists, of a Committee of Public Safety, of substituting " business men " for the politicians, and so on. Among mad political ideas one of the maddest is that business men can suddenly take over Parliamentary and depart- mental work and do it well. Behind all these proposals is the tendency to believe in " a Man "—if only a man could be found. Of course, it is true that the need often reveals the right person, but so far as one can see at present there is no Man in sight. There is no one who could perform the equivalent of Thiers' famous role of " over- coming the scruples " of Louis Philippe, or of his greater feat of becoming the " Man " himself and persuading his countrymen to swallow the leek and make the only possible deal with Bismarck in 1871.
" Get rid of the State monopolies !" cry the nostrum- mongers. " Sell them for vast sums to private speculators and we shall tide over our difficulties without iniquitous direct taxation. Sell the telephones ! Sell the railways ! Sell the tobacco monopoly ! " We do not know how it will all end, but it is certain that France must quickly consent to tax herself with severity if the franc is not to imitate the mark and the rouble and take wings to itself. Too long France has maintained the illusion that because trade (helped immediately though it was by inflation) was good, and unemployment was non- existent, all would yet be well and the Furies of Finance could somehow be placated.
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