THE CHINA MAIL, TUESDAY, AUGUST 25,· · · 1953.
FRANCE: A RICH LAND GROWN POOR IN SPIRIT
By NOEL BARBER
The political issue cannot be solved because the politicians mough. Each Prime Minister is at the mercy of his M.Ps, for France is ruled by her Deputies, who have alt
power but the iesponsibilities.
RANCE is the last that he has certainly succeed- a cost. This great country of ves-ed, but at what terday in the world of paradise "of dummy goods in the are not strong
window has been achieved at of self-discipline tomorrow. It is her greatest the expense tragedy, for it means the and any altruistle thought for French no longer realise the future of both France and that without change you de- the world..
As one let
ne
cay.
This is the fruitful land, with
kifted
zest
who loves
France there are many me say
Frenchmen. They
are riches to lavish on the rest of everywhere. But the conditions
brains, with Europe,
give that exist today do not with a scintillating
for them any opportunities for 31fe that should be leading the there is always somebody body rest of Europe across the last green helds of a better world, around the corner to strangle at birth the genesis of new Ideas instead of staggering blindly that would bring back to France across a spiritual deseri lured the glory that rightly should be
the mirages of "the hers, by good old days?"
While the honest strive
there strikes against difleullies Once aga tear the country in two. Is it thousands who salt their money because of the downtrodden abread or in gold. poor, of the lack of justice, of
on
overwork
for
underpay,
starvair and misery?
Ignored
of
in
Bre
every
none of
they
Gill
The
them it What matter to Government falls? They
And their jobs. keep Prime Minister has to go touting dozen or more round-the parties of every shade, wheed- ing support from them, yet since moment. And knowing it can be withdrawn there is no single political party strong enough to keep a Gov- crament going, even the honest politicians cannot grope towards the future.
at
any
WHAT
dazed
Admirers
wonder littio
the
that Frenchman-
There is rough gold hidden
France 10 give
WHA and chlid in the Inon, wonas, Country £70 each. There are in-the-strot is
in danger of more plush American cars in the
mustn'L giving up hope! He Champs-Elysees fund they can
It would be idle to deny that unly be bought with dollars)
ban in any country outside the France is drifting, but if hope
Hoes there U.S.
moral renaissance. And France at least is rich in one thing. She has people in every corner of the world who love her, who her always will, who admire
No, that is only partly true,
It is true
that the postal
Yet only 5,000 Frenchmen de- the workers (who .started
clared their last year's income strike) are underpaid, So we
millions in France by at £2,000 or more. many our standards, much that should be done for them. Too often they have been eynically Ignored.
and there
is
Cynicism
But there is mother sile
YNICISM brought this of the picture fon. Many people
about, but not only cynicism, strike for a standard of living France's very structure has that is for higher than thousands changed since "the good old enjoy in England.
lived in France for eight days" she loves to much. Be- fore
the fat war four odi of
years until this summer, and five Frenchmen produced food, though fool was expensive I clothing, conl, and shelter, and
ays of a month
days
look back with envy on those or two ago wlion I paid 25.
2s. for 20 cigarettes,
a pint for wine, 16s, for a
fur One had One
of
battic brandy.
bottle of
2
one out of five lived by his wits Today only two-thirds of the people provide the stuff of life. and a third try to live by their wits.
It is just too big a burden for cheap seats at the cinema, con- France's dwindling number of trolled rents (often only is, a producers to bear. The end re- week in central Paris), and fult is that this rich country like everybody else in France struggles desperately for food a month's holiday with pay coal, and housing, yet has
surplus of
such. each year and a month's extra staggering
metaphysics) production. A puy at Christmas.
No, wages are not the only enterinianitnt and red tape,
reason for these strikes and for apparently incurable disease
the
that has swept France since the end of the war. There is
13
can
never be
for what she has given to the world. With that there is always room for the hope that
Coether called "the second soul of the unhappy."
Malenkov Out For
Profit
by GWILYM WILLIAMS
This dearth has been aggra- WELL, whoever would have thought it would gated by the tune war in Indo- China that has shnost to death,
Cummings
"And there, Mesdames et Messieurs, is the famous Eiffel-er-Tower." London Express Borvie.
A strange adventure into the midnight
ין
depths of the Tyrrhenian Sea
Piccard Is Coy About His Dive
W
By BRIAN CONNELL
Rome. HEN. I first saw Professor Auguste Piccard he was about to be run down by screaming conga line of eight- year-old Italian children on the open-air dunce terrace of the Hotel Quisisana di Castellammare. The Quisisana was the aum- mer palace of the last King of the Two Sicilys. Now its gleaming pink stucco, half-way up Mount Faito, with a superb view across the Bay of Naples to Vesuvius, houses teeming middle.
class families on holiday..
It was 10.30 p.m. Italian, children, it seems, stay up all night. The pro- fessor had been away all day in Naples getting new accumulator batteries for the bathyscaphe in which he hopes to
down
thousands of feet in the
deep Tyrrhenian off the island 'ot Ponza,
From the royal suite, in which the Dowager Duchess of Aosta died in 1951, Piceard stniks twice daily down the hill to the lile naval dockyard half a mile below.
.
The emaciated 60-year-old profes- sor with his peculiar lunging galt, rather like a Cft. 3in. Groucho Marx- white hair curling in a bob round his cars, spectacles with an extra pair of lenses which Bnp up on his forehead, giving him the air of an amiable four eyed cyclops--has been one of the sights of Castellammare for four months.
On Guard
ways,
immense
the
This little port, with its two slip
and factory, majority of its 40,000 inhabitants seemingly with no visible means of support, crammed into noisy tenements, polluting the bay, has found the pro fessor's queer craft a rich source of humour.
Barefoot urchins, dressed only from neck to waist,, pluck at his cont-tails and beg him to bring up some "fritture di pesce," the indeterminate minnows and sardines which provide the poverty.
stricken Neapolitans with their occasional square meal.
Piccard lunges grimly through them and disappears into the guarded gates beyond which the bathysenphe lles,
They are building a couple of smali tankers along the curving mote and. the square white conning tower with the name "Trieste" on the bathyscaphe. is clearly visible about 150 yards away from the shore.
I went out in a rowboat to within a few yards of the flag-buoy marked "security zone," but was greeted by a hall of imprecations from a marine which had even my tough guard Neapolitan boatman rowing like a Dla mond Sculls champion for the shore ngain.
Eye On Cash
For someone who looks, like the colteme of an absent-minded professor, Piccard in sharp business man,
The Italian navy has sunk £100,- 000 In the project so far. The profes- sor has sold the film rights of his ex- pedition for £15,000 and the news- paper and stil picture rights for an
to a French other substantial sum syndicate.
Tho
Perhaps his son Jacques, 6ft 7in. and
an economist, looks after such sor did details for him. Journalists are usually greeted with a demand for a Brm offer from their proprietors of a stated mun for an interview: security cordon round the dockyard to Harwell or Atom- would do credit grad.
The Italian Press is enraged, and the Navy Minister has been obliged to to enable other exert his authority Press men to salt in the tug which, in due course, will tow the bathyscaphe out to sea.
I comered the professor at lunch Over his the next day in the hotel. bolled rice and melted butter and a few grapes I managed to persuade him. into a few remarks.
I prompted him about the univer
This sal appeal of selenufie exploits. expedition is purely exploratory," he said. "I want to prove that it is pos sible to descend to great depths and. navigate there in perfect safely,
and sea-.
drained France come to this? After all the JOHN DEANE POTTER goes from the racetrack to the finance fringe
Because of all this the coun-hate-filled attacks on capi-
one thing more that is missing try is crowded with discontent-talism by Karl Marx, after -any sign of spiritual belief in the future of
Eን
cd
the Stalin
เฟ cloquent com the outpourings of Friedrich and intellectunis France,
who produce it has brest a desperate cynicism nothing tangible towards the Engels, the vitriol of Lenin,
that now the Frenchmah
sledgehammer lives for today and forgels to
aimed at the iniquity of morrow.
making money, what hap- pens?
All he wants Is that his country should for a long
resurgence of France, and who when a strike starts with genuine grievance {us nost French strikes do) immediately enlarge it, take it away from its last original issue and, uided by the be as gay and enjoyable es It Communista, turn it into a poli- was before the war; and In tical battle.
as the
good times
CHINESE
CREEDS
and
CUSTOMS
by
V. R. BURKHARDT ILLUSTRATED. BY THE AUTHOR
Printed and Published by South China Morning Post, Ltd.
FIRST EDITION NOW ON SALE
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KOWLOON
here
is
Communisl
worried about
Why. Russia getting her own profits.
Even a Communist State has to keep books. Even a Com- munist-run factory has to know, at some stage, how its incomings compare with its output.
THE CITY MAN' WHO
DEALS
IN
RUMOURS
the
market
Then the zoologists
ologists can take over. Three- quarters of the earth's crust is an unknown quantity. I am try- Ing to provide the means of eils- covering its composition, but I can give no date for the attempt." Trial Trip
дре men
the
The
professor will not have.
called a bathyscope, which he described as the "eap-
his crafts
Ja
tive and dangerous" object which the American, Charles Willian
at. Boobe, descended the end of a cable to 3,000 fast
off Bermuda in 1034.
Piccard's bathyscaphe is a sort of under-water dirigible, rumour But the
with many of the characteristics London, they sit in their customary coffee in the City cafe. He feels
compared with as dwarfs
And there are of an airship. O the neighbours who seats in a cafe near the the pulse int
tenderly as a nurse in love with glants who think and deal income details he gave me about....... nod to him on the Stock Exchange.
are the take- |- her patient and before the stock millions. They morning train as he
And, because there is no begins to falter he is out with a over men. his pink- coloured financial paper, hecome tax on Stock Ex- nice profit.
hange gains, a rumour man is the epitome of a man can make £5,000 a year tax who is "something in the free. So it may be that the cost City." accountant that white-collared
But Soviet accountants in In such a gigantic muddle that the Russian Government hos sud- denly woken up, since the death of Stalin, to find itself in serious financial straits.
as the most important technician in Russia.
settles behind
by a mathematician, his
All the plans for rüising liv-shoes are as shiny as a drill years. He makes
a pro-
Inches
The gondola, a hollow, stcel sphere, full of scientifle Instru- When shipping was very short ments, is 6ft. Gin. In diameter after the war the takeover men with walls nearly four inches He is the ice-headed expert
eyed the small shipping com- thick, with a conical porthole who operates skilfully in the
panies very sharply. They cir-four inches wide inside and 18
outside. of atmosphere nerve- totu
cularised the shareholders, ofter, This is susp
suspended under This is how he does it. He Throgmorton Street where ing them twice or three times "balloon" shaped like a stubby • symbol of the capitalist system His umbrella looks as finds a company which has many do not know what
will displace the atom scientist though it has been folded declared low dividends for believe,
to the current price of their shores, cigar about 30 feet long through which a conning tower gives access to the gondola. The bal- loon contains 25,000 gallons of petrol weighing 70 tons,
Other compartments contain
11 is. tilted at "Did you hear that A-a big Y IKE so many tipsters, some sold at a large profit and the nearly 10 tons of steel shot.. The petrol contained in compariments in the float, is for angle over financier-is interested in times his rumours are true, company closed down
buoyancy. The shot is held in getting control of XYZ com- And sometimes the big financler
- When the shipping situation place by electro-magnets which hears the rumour about himself cased about a year ago, the drop their load when the current They pitcure him going pany?"
and as a result of it docs become takeover men began to look is cut, permitting the bathy- desk in a The man to whom this is interested in the company. This around for new targels.
scaphe to rise. to his walnut marble-walled office not far addressed is asked to regard possibility causes a lot of grey from the spinsterish facade it
confidential. ng
But hair to sprout under City bowler
longed, expert scrutiny of ing standards could founder be- sergeant's. His bowler, the balance sheet. Then he
the Russian concerns with
exactly the right sipa his coffee and says: which make profits get fewer
curved brim,
cause
every year.
It is not fantastic to suppose exactly the right That instead of tempting atom his nose. men and diplomatists to Russia Red emissaries will soon be combing the West for men who can keep books. Russians are traditionally bad at accounts.
ABACUS-MINDED
Until quite recently large masses ribbed along with the abacus those rows of beads to
of the Bank of England. within a few minutes he is bata,
in another cafe whispering If they followed him the news, just na he was. help children count. And there along narrow Throgmorton intended to do.
ore
still plenty of
abacus Street, past the offices next minded men in top jobs in to the Stock Exchange
to
LEAKAGES
}
Naturally no shareholder re- fused, and within a short while they had taken over the com- Often the ships wore pany.
L
OLD GAME
would
Electric batteries provide the power for the two propellers →→→ maximum speed 300 yards an hour for the pumpe and for the powerful searchlights.; One
Pressure rumour worrying the HEY soon found them in
of water T Arm of businesses which own a lot crush the bathyscaphegat 30,000 City today concerns warehousemen. Someone whis- of property. Many of these have feet. Piceard has ret himself a' not hall their property valued"security depth" of 12-10,000. pered that
well-known store for 30 years. When the take-feet. Russian factories.
and girls WHISPER-BALL
with a huge branch in one of over men study the assets they The necumulators were still The absence of trained men where the men
not Installed when
the who understand costing in the with headphones are already
worth £400,000 are probably bathyscaphe made a trial plungo, their lease in two years. capitalist and not the Marxian beginning to chant the first BEFORE the rumour man their buildings, have to renew realise that buildings shown as
worth a million today. So the of 10 frej-In the dirty waters. way is at last being appreciated morning price changes into starts the whisper-ball as a fundamental deficiency in
Ah, zay
the rumour men, it old game of circularising the of the dockyard, with the pro telephones, they would see rolling he buys a sack of
shareholders staris.
fessor and Jacques checking the Russian economy.
Malcakov had him turn down a flight of shares in the company, not will cost them a lot of money to
furiously for further defects. In fact, Premier
It might be cheaper
The directors of the company But after that the professor narrow in his own name of course. do that. much of his last steps into a long, devote
for them to buy the building, watch this with all the joy of a announced he will make his first cafe with speech to the profit and loss underground
descent Within a few hours the shares Whatever happens the ware rabbit that has just seen a deep-water
outside. theine, just like the chairman of yellow tablecloths and cane of XYZ company, which have housemen will make money. enake. They realise the new Castellammare harbour at 0a.m.
in Britain trading company
chairs. This is known to not been active for months.
owners may not, neet them of the next day. talkir
to his shareholders,
Then another mari has heard director.
Time is working against the Behind Malenkov's assess-stockbrokers as The Drain. begin to vibrate slightly on the
exchange.
As the clerks chalk for certain that a second firm is
professor, Unfavourable currents" ment of Russian industrial and
Serves them right say the after the end of August may agricultural prospects there is There he orders a 7d, cup the price rise on the board, going to outbld the store for the
stockbrokers, for being so mean oblige him to move the attempt disquiet at the of coffee and settles down people who have not heard the site,
with their dividends and not from Ponza to Syracuse or Cape The warehouse directors have reallsing how their assets have Matapan-or even force a post-
to bo ponement until next yvar,, out a circular denying Increased. They deserve rumours now being circulated." taken over
A Rival a in the exchange — scamper. In spite of this the shares have.
through the back door fato
No one knows the takeover riken 15. in two months. Shorters Court. There they un-
men's latest plan. But as toon lock little mahogany boxes in
Other rumours are started by as there is a hint of the rum- These contain jeokages.
our men will crank up the easy; the street walls. telephones rented by their firms.
money merry-go-round.. "They report the upward share
and so swing
the rumour extends.
clearly deep that are eating up to his day's work. He has rumour begin to show interest.
Tuinous losses
coal
the capital of the Soviet Union. arrived at his office.
The trouble: starts
with com and ümber—two
key
Industries. His work? He is Boh should .be. making large
profits. But the Russian Coal rumour man. Board every your far more than its counterpart in Britain. And only abysmal Incom petetice can account for the vast losses in the timber industry.
UP AND DOWN
Good prices should be obtained HE busily spreads rumours
world markets, where there is
"round" the
Stock Ex-
The blue button med-the Authorized clerks who can trade
sent
NEW TARGETS
Worst of all, he has a rival. His frat bathyscaphe, the "FRNS 2" in which he made a number of unsuccessful experiments off the Cape Verde Islands In 1948, If you ever meet one of them was retained by the French going borrie on the train, clogged Navy at Toulon. Now It has us wa
with coffee after a hard day's been rebuilt and tests are joking. n koeri domandi Wages are low, change which cause stocks Next day the investing public directors of a company to ask him what his occupation
whispering, you may be tempted place,
On the wall of one of the and much of the work in the
and starts to HE forests is done by prison labour to rise or fall. Some guc notices the rise
This is
decide that they would like is. He will tell you he is an in- dockyard bulldings at Castel- for nothing.
Ua, old Mussolini Yo the timber cessful Throgmorton Street Come Into the market.
known to the stockbrokera as to buy another business, Ball- vestor. He will say this with Jammare is
www.klogan, We are 11 Mediter Industry deeply in the red. rumour men - havý a desk whe widows, orphans and citors, accountants, and others out a smile.
Then a clerk
roncat. approached, The next Soviet slogan may and a telephone. But the parsons money."
people and our "destiny"
For, the time well be "Back to the Profit overheads of many consist
In one of their offices hears Invpalot? He has never in-fles on the som." Motive." Unless : Malenkov in
rumour proven to be something about the plan. And vesil a poring, in his life. He being the professor's destiny. first eliminated as a crypto- only of the price of dozené untrue they will suffer, not the the pops into a cato. to tau to a leaves that to the widows and lies under the sos, but he may
gorphanag
babesten to 120 capitalist.
of daily cups of coffee as immaculate operator sipping-blu, man behind a coffee sup..
If the
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