High Steward

Looms this spring a French general election. Will the "Sacred Union Cabinet" of Premier Raymond Poincare hold together and face the country as a unit? For months jockeying politicians have been trying to engineer a split. Last week a great speech, eight hours long, was delivered on two successive days by Premier & Finance Minister Poincare. When he sat down virtually all correspondents cabled that the union of his Cabinet for election purposes is now monolithic. Was this news? Characteristically, the U. S. press played down or omitted a story of quiet, constructive achievement, so lacking in the ever welcome promise that one more luckless European premier is about to fall.

Plowing through mountains of statistics, but enlivening his discourse with a running undercurrent of wit and a few sly I-told-you-so's, M. Poincare presented an 18-month record of brilliant financial stewardship which no other living statesman can match. He has saved the franc from what seemed irretrievable decline, raised and stabilized it de facto at 25 to the dollar, drastically reduced the French internal debt, and accomplished all this without recourse to foreign credits and without having to secure ratification of the (in France) intensely unpopular Franco-U. S. debt settlement.

Last week High Steward Poincare completed his indirect accounting and appeal to the electorate by shrewdly declaring that in 1928 he will (i.e. if supported at the general election) complete the fiscal rehabilitation of France by finally and legally stabilizing the franc.