the apparent prosperity of France touch their spirit, I think. I have seen them lately sitting in the smaller cafés with their sweethearts-there is always love, poor boys!—and they were shabby young men, rather pinched-looking, rather lean and sharp-featured. They do not come from the rich merchant class-les mercantis, as those folk are called in French slang but are mostly the sons of professional men and civil servants who cannot afford much in the way of an allowance. Things have altered since the War. Prices have gone up-abominably. "In the old days," I was told by a French professor, "I paid 30 francs a month for my room. It wasn't very large or very grand, but I had a table, a chair, a bookcase, and even found room for an armchairwhich was luxury! Now a student must pay 300 francs a month for a miserable lodging and is lucky if he gets one, because every apartment is snapped up by foreigners or married folk who are desperate for house-room."

beauty. So I found it lately in the Salon d'Automne. For their pictures of the nude they had chosen models of extreme grossness-fat old women, coarse old fishwives, whom they represented with a brutality that was quite obscene. All their pictures were a kind of savage destruction of the loveliness of life, and I

In the old days the students I knew used to go to a creamery and have an excellent breakfast, including an egg, for 50 centimes. Now it costs them 3 francs. They could live comfortably with a margin for the fun of life on 10 francs a day. Now crowds of them are living miserably, without the barest margin, on 20 francs a day. Three of them died of starvation during recent months.

Perhaps it is this hard life, or some spiritual aftermath of war, which gives to their art a hardness and crudity which seems like a deliberate revolt against

found a cult of ugli

ness, a lack of form, a worship of "strength" divorced from spiritual ideals.

The housing question-and the cost of lodging-is acute, not only in Paris but also in many cities, and is the cause of the most frightful peril to France-the decrease of population and a hidden bitterness in the spirit of the French people.

"How is it possible," I was asked

by a Frenchman,

to

up home-life, and rear families, when they cannot afford the rent of the most modest apartment, or find accommodation even for themselves, without the additional space for a baby and a nurse?”

In that way the foreigners are a curse to Paris, in spite of the money they bring there, because they seize upon the only available lodgings and raise the price of rents. The rise in the rent of houses and flats, the steady and frightening increase in the cost of living, and additional taxation of small incomes, were the main causes of the political change which threw Poincaré out of office and brought in Herriot and his Government of the Left. Poincaré's "rigid" policy in foreign affairs, his failure to get reparations from

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Germany, even by the occupation of the Ruhr, made the French people desire a change. They were afraid of the future, as many of them told me, because of the new hate being stirred up in Germany and the estrangement with England.

But it was that internal problem which swung the scales heavily in favor of the Left. For a long time it had criticized M. Poincaré's régime fiercely because of its failure to restrict rising prices and secure a decent standard of life for the salaried classes. France gave the Socialist Left a chance to do something under the leadership of Herriot. They did nothing to redeem their promises. There was no more house-room. The cost of life increased. They tried to cover their failure by stirring up religious trouble and raising the old bogey of "clericalism."

As a Frenchman explained to me, "As long as the anticlericals can devour a curé they forget the price of artichokes."

But there were people who could not forget, and who will not forgive the Herriot Government for neglecting the interests of the small wage earning people -the people who made the greatest sacrifice in the War-while granting amnesties to men like Caillaux and Malvy and others accused of political crimes when France was fighting for its life.

When one of Herriot's ministers was making an eloquent speech he was interrupted by an elderly workman.

"Monsieur," said the man simply, "it is all very fine, what you are saying about that amnesty for all the rascals of France. It is generous and Christian, without a doubt. But when are you going to do something for honest men?"

"I confess," said the Vice-President of the Senate, who told me this story, goodhumoredly, "that I could find nothing to say for the moment-Gascon as I am!"

On the last Armistice Day through the streets of Paris came a tragic procession, which brought tears to the eyes of all who watched-so painful that many had not the courage to watch but turned their eyes away. It was a procession of blind and mutilated men from the little homes where they hide their infirmities-20,000

of them. They were the men who had saved France. Now they came silently to present their claims for an increase of pensions which would enable them to live in some better way than halfstarvation and miserable poverty. The walls of Paris, the villages in the devastated areas, were placarded, as I saw, with this appeal by the mutilated men, and by the widows and orphans of the heroic dead. All is not well with France when her heroes suffer while contractors grow rich and fat out of the reconstruction of the ruined regions and out of the profits of the rising prices of life's necessities.

SPECULATION AFTER DEVASTATION

the same emotion about the sufferings of the victims of that ravaged land up north. The enormous cost of reconstruction paralyses national finance, causes an immense deficit in the annual budget, depreciates the value of French money in foreign exchange, and necessitates heavy taxation.

"They are making a fine thing out of their devastated regions," says the cynical Frenchman of Paris and the Midi. "Would to Heaven I had a destroyed house up there!"

It has been a happy hunting ground of corruption and scandal. Speculators bought up the claims of private individuals, exploited them at the expense of the state, putting in claims for enormous damages admitted by Government officials and local authorities, all in the game together. Les camarades, they are called by the cynics. Contractors grow fat with wealth out of the supply of building materials and those swollen claims. There was a phantom glass factory which had never been destroyed by German bombardment, because it never existed. There were masses of steel plates sent from Germany under the reparations account and transported, not to the devastated regions, but to Japan-at a fabulous profit after the earthquake in Tokio, to the great benefit of a group of camarades.

Hundreds of other cases as bad as that have leaked out. The French Government has spent more than a thousand milliards of francs in the reconstruction of the devastated region. It is a figure not shown in the budget but put into a separate account under the heading "recoverable expenditure." Unfortunately, it is not yet recovered from Germany, and there are many Frenchmen -most of them now-who believe that it will never be recovered. It is the financial precipice which looms ahead when the day of reckoning comes upon the younger generation. It is easy to see that the appeal for the devastated regions has lost its emotional character for citizens not in that part of France. Pity dries up when charity is a ruinous taxation.

Up in the old war zone where I have just been, there is a different point of view. Contractors may have made

directed by the Coöperative Societies of Reconstruction, which are voluntary associations of war victims dealing with the state authorities, and acting as intermediaries between the Government and the population. Those who could pull the most political wires received priority of payment, and some of the wires were

red-hot. Now, at the end of 1924, work is beginning to slow down because the Government finds it hard to pour out the remaining capital, and claims are being scrutinized more closely.

It has been a marvelous work, all the same, and I took off my hat to the energy and industry of France in rebuilding its ruins and cultivating the ravaged lands which for four years I saw under the flail of war. Up the old Albert - Bapaume road, the highway of the Somme battlefields, only the dead stumps of trees and the graveyards of the fallen remain as memorials of those dreadful years.

great fortunes, the Government has been greatly generous, but-in spite of all the work done in reconstruction of factories and dwelling houses-there are still immense numbers of people waiting for new homes on the site of the old places from which they fled when the flame of war drew near. I found people still living in the old Nissen huts of the British Army, or in wooden shacks amidst half-finished houses and old ruins-six years after the ending of war!

On the whole, in the Department of the Nord about three quarters of the work of reconstruction had been accomplished at the end of 1924. It has been

One thing struck me instantly, and was a revelation of a new phase in the life of France, when I took the train from Amiens and stepped out at Albert and walked through streets of brand new houses, past the Church of the Golden Virgin, which is still a ruin. The people about me were not French. The workmen building the new houses were not laborers of France. When I asked the way of a man outside an estaminet, he shook his head and answered in Italian.

An immense amount of foreign labor is being employed in this task of reconstruc

will have to be paid out of the pockets of the French citizen. Babies are too expensive in such economic conditions. At the most, not more than one!

The single child in France is the normal standard. He is petted by the whole clan of uncles, aunts, and cousins. At six years of age his own little world seems to revolve about him, eager to satisfy his smallest wish, to keep him amused, to provide him with pleasure. In the Luxembourg Gardens I have been watching the children of France, and listening to their laughter before the guignol shows-old Punch and Judyin the Champs Elysées, and seeing them on the flying horses and galloping pigs up in the great circus of the Boulevard de Clichy.

France is the paradise of children. Crowds gather round to watch. them at play. The very eyes of the agents de police

It is only in the most Catholic parts of France that large families are still common. The Bretons are being imported into southeastern France for that very reason to make up the depleted population. It is partly because of the Catholic traditions of marriage that many Frenchmen, formerly irreligious, are supporting

the Catholic revival in France, which has been noticeable since the War. That, and a hatred of socialism and communism, and the politics of the Left, which to many moderate-minded Frenchmen and to all the old aristocracy and to a great many small farmers, seem to be unpatriotic, and to weaken the security of France. They can see no sense in the new anti-clerical movement-the chasing of priests and nuns who did heroic work in the War- the young priests fought and died like martyrsand the stirring up of religious strife. The Roman Catholic Church in France, justly or unjustly, has become associated too closely with a royalist movement, which is conservative rather than royalist, and purely sentimental. The War revived the glorious memories of French history under the days of monarchy. The greatest generals of France, from Foch downward, conformed to Catholicism, and all the demonstrations of victory and the prayers of the people in the years of agony made the Church the symbol of French nationalism.

soften at the sight of them. I have just come from a christening of two new-born babes in a little church in a low quarter of Paris. The whole congregation watched the ceremony with emotional interest. Two little lives added to France -that was good! Admirable! The father and mother were regarded with admiration and esteem. But what a risk, with But what a risk, with the cost of living so high in Paris!

There is no discipline, I am told, among the modern youth of France. Young people are selfish, egotistical, neurotic, pleasure-loving. Perhaps it is because the large family has gone out of fashion and the single child is too much pampered.

There is talk of a royalist movement in the Army, among the younger officers who think the military position of France,