Tue downfall of M. Briand's Ministry has come about in a curiously irregular and, so far as recent information carries us, unexpected manner. On Monday we were told that the action of disaffected Radicals bad precipitated Cabinet crisis. This was followed by the announcement that M. Pichon, Minister of Foreign Affairs, and other leading members of the Cabinet bad resolved to follow their chief into retreat owing to the impossibility of working with an vastable majority; and only yesterday was M. Briand's actual resignution made known. Moreover the Republicens have taken their stand and on which the insurgent
would appear to be largely insincere. Since the day when, as Minister of Justice in M. Clemencean's administration, M. Briand was first entrasted with the supervising of the separation of Church and State in France, his attitude towards the religious orders has been that which his early training as a lawyer and his later development as politician might have suggested, namely a strictly judicial one. That he should. have treated the Congregations which chose to conform to established law with the same toleration that be would extend to any basinessassociation, was merely in accordance with his avowed determination given in the great at the opening of the new Chamber last July, to govern by majority with due regard for the minority's rights. But while we may well believe that such toleration would excite the wrath of the extreme anti-Church party, there is not enough in recent information to warrant this alone being chosen as an all-sufficing basis of attack, and we have to sock deeper for motives of opposition strong enough to compel so determined a leader as M. Briand to own himself beaten.
Tt may indeed be felt that the present crisis is but the culmination of a series of events of which almost any one alone would have been sufficient to undermine a Minister Jess stout-hearted than M. Briand.
the personal hostility to himself asama, to which he attributes his defeat, we know nothing: of
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.