reased in France since that date, judges the
government's economic policy by the results obtained and passes to the
order of the day."[34]

Shortly afterward the same Chamber recanted and gave the Cabinet a
majority. In Great Britain, too, the House of Commons put pressure on
the government, which at last was forced to act.

On the other hand, extravagance was systematically encouraged everywhere
by the shortsighted measures which the authorities adopted and
maintained as well as by the wanton waste promoted or tolerated by the
incapacity of their representatives. In France the moratorium and
immunity from taxation gave a fillip to recklessness. People who had
hoarded their earnings before the war, now that they were dispensed from
paying rent and relieved of fair taxes, paid out money ungrudgingly for
luxuries and then struck for higher salaries and wages.

Even the Deputies of the Chamber, which did nothing to mitigate the evil
complained of, manifested a desire to have their own salaries--six
hundred pounds a year--augmented proportionately to the increased cost
of living; but in view of the headstrong current of popular opinion
against parliamentarism the government deemed it impolitic to raise the
point at that conjuncture.

Most of the working-men's demands in France as in Britain were granted,
but the relief they promised was illusory, for prices still went up,
leaving the recipients of the relief no better off. And as the wages
payable for labor are limited, whereas prices may ascend to any height,
the embittered laborer fancied he could better his lot by an appeal to
the force which his organization wielded. The only complete solution of
the problem, he was assured, was to be found in the supersession of the
governing classes and the complete reconstruction of the social fabric
on wholly new foundations.[35] And some of the leaders rashly declared
that they were unable to discern the elements of any other.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Cf. _The Daily Mail_ (Paris edition), March 12,1919.

[2] On December 18, 1918.

[3] "With what little wisdom the world is governed."

[4] "Mr. Bernard Richards, Secretary of the delegation from the American
Jewish Congress to the Peace Conference, expressed much satisfaction
with the work done in Paris for the protection of Jewish rights and the
furtherance of the interests of other minorities involved in the peace
settlement." (_The New York Herald_, July 20, 1919.) How successf