Dec.
It is impossible not to ware political events in France with a considerable amount of sympathy, for the action of the majority in the Senate, hostile to the Tardieu ministry is but another example of the precarious tenure which so many French Cabinets have had in the adjacent past upon office. Since the reassembly of the French Parliament, M. Tardieu has been the object of repeated attacks from the radicals, who at the congress at Grenoble definitely laid down their policy of upset ing the government at all costs. That in itself would be serious enough for in the Senate the opposition was strong enough, and when it wished, to thwart the government on any point it liked. A similar state of affairs has not been unknown in other legislatures. The intransigeant attitude of the radical group was helped to no small extent by the recent bank crashes, which not only tended to weaken the ministry's personnel by the resignations which took place but afforded a portion of the jumping off ground from which was launched attack on the general, "ey of the government which led to its defeat by the small majority of eight votes—147 as against 199, a poll in which 286 senators voted out of a house of 314! members. It is difficult to believe, even if the division had included the whole membership of the senate the result would have been any different, so that though, numerically, the defeat was not imposing, it was sufficient to indicate to M. Tardieu that he could no longer carry on, More particularly must this. be so when it is remembered that the government was not defeated on the sole question of the failure of the Oustric bank, but over its policy as a whole. M. Hery vigorously attacked M.: Tardieu's ministry on all points of general difference, and while the cables to hand do not give any detailed account of his speech, there is enough reported of M. Tardieu's spirited defence to indicate the lines which the opposition followed. He was criticised on the score that hig attempts to solve the questions arising out of the worldwide economic crisis were of an_incomplete and temporary efficacity, and that his adoption of M. Poincaré's attitude with regard to the revision of the treaties did not fit in with' republican ideas on the subject. And finally, there is M. Martin's statement that the Democratic Left could not support the government against the motion of non-confidence by reason of the divergence of 3L' Tardiey policy from the essential a ciples of republicanism. It clear that any government attacked along three such lines
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.