Chamber Meets

Meeting in the Palais-Bourbon last week after four months' recess, the French Chamber of Deputies:

P: Mourned the death last week of the Borah of France, Senator Victor Berard, 67, Chairman of the French Senate's Foreign Affairs Committee. He, the scholarly assistant director of the Ecole dcs Hantes Etudes, resembled Senator Borah in exceedingly few respects. After 44 years of preparation, Senator Berard published recently his great tome Did Homer Live? Weighing the evidence pro & con with vast erudition, he cautiously concluded that Homer in all probability did live.

"The Odyssean poem." he ventured, "seems to be the work of one man, highly literate and a great poet." Contrary-minded professors fear that the works of "Homer" are an ancient hash, comprising the efforts of several great poets and ballad singers, not all of them literate.

P: Cheered a pledge by Premier Pierre Laval to stave off unemployment, which has come late to prosperous France, by spending four billion francs ($150,000,000) extra on public works.

Officially the Ministry of Labor admitted only 61,000 French unemployed last week, but La Liberte guessed "more than 1,000,000."

L'Intransigeant, while conservatively guessing "between 250,000 and 300,000 unemployed," ominously remarked: "There are 1,500,000 foreigners employed in France of whom at least 500,000 could be deported immediately."

P: Studied preliminary budget plans laid before the Chamber by peppery Budget Minister Francois Pietri who thinks he can balance expenditures and receipts from April 1 until Dec. 31, 1932 at 41 billion francs ($1,599,000,000).

In thus closing his budget year at the end of the calendar year, M. Pietri would scrap the present French fiscal year closing April 1.

Throughout France all local budgets close at the end of the calendar year n'est pas, Messieurs?" persuasively inquired M. Pietri last week. "I propose to put the national budget on the same logical footing!" Last year's French budget closed last April 1 with a deficit of $100,000,000.

P: Gave Premier Laval a small working vote-of-confidence, 311 to 272, on the issue of French State Railway passenger fares which the Government was authorized to up. Deliberately the Premier postponed debate on his visit to President Hoover, hoping to have something to show for it before the Chamber began to criticize. This "something" would, of course, be a move by Germany to take the "initiative" (desired by Mr. Hoover and M. Laval) in proposing a re-examination of Reparations and War Debts.

Ever since his return to Paris, M. Laval has been hard at it with German Ambassador Leopold von Hoesch (TIME, Nov. 9), but Deutschland has proved coy. If she is to take the initiative, Germany wants to propose a joint reconsideration of her business obligations (private short- term credits) along with her political Reparations debt.

Since French bankers have supplied few German short-term credits, M. Laval has been telling Herr von Hoesch every day for a fortnight that Reparations cannot and must not be jumbled with short-term credits. But British pressure made it seem that Germany might refuse to take the initiative unless some scheme of reconsidering and scaling down all the Fatherland's obligations at once is agreed to by France.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.