Budget Battle

Hotly pressed last week was the annual battle between statesmen who want to balance the Budget of France by the first of the year and politicians who would like to go on talking about it until early spring.

The furious oratorical flank attacks seriously embarrassed the Generalissimo of the Budget, keen, masterful Raymond Poincare, Prime Minister, Finance Minister, and famed as the man who saved the franc two years ago from utter collapse (TIME, Aug. 16, 1926).

Socialist members of the Chamber's Finance Committee fairly screamed objections to the budgeted military, naval and air expenditure of six billion eight hundred million francs ($265,000,000) during 1929. They thought that at least one of the billions ought to be spent on measures of social relief. Particularly did they object to an allotment of 150,000,000 francs ($5,850,000) for the construction of fortifications along the frontier of disarmed Germany.

Of course such Socialist heckling perturbed not at all the "Iron Premier," who, backed by the military and naval experts of France and supported by a public which still fears German attack, can jam through billions for defense more easily than for any other purpose.

Less easily disposed of by M. Poincare was an issue adroitly concocted by Socialists and Radicals. They pounced upon a budgetary bill which would permit the Government at its discretion to restore certain properties confiscated from the clergy under the great Secularization Bill of 1905, whereby the French church and state were separated. Loud demands were soon current that M. Poincare must withdraw this measure, or the Socialists and Radicals would order the Ministers representing them in the present Sacred Union Cabinet (TIME. Aug. 2, 1926) to withdraw. Stung to action the Prime Minister confronted critics with an adroit blend of suavity and truculence.

The bill in question had been prepared, he said, to enable the Government to extend assistance to clerical missions in the far flung French colonies. Their work was of the greatest value in coordinating a Colonial Empire so vast that it is the second largest in the world. The Cabinet as a whole and more especially its Radical and Socialist members, added M. Poincare, had never been consulted by him with respect to the bill, which had originated in the Foreign Ministry, where sole responsibility must rest. Thereupon, having blandished, explained and weaseled, the Prime Minister set his firm, pointed jaw and barked that he refused on his own responsibility to alter the bill, and critics could like or lump. There was of course, he smiled in conclusion, not the remotest thought of uniting church and state.