"America Is a Fairyland!"

Hard-bitten French pilots piled their fighting planes full of flowery bouquets at Havre last week, zoomed aloft with warlike clatter. Circling around the incoming 5. S. He de France, they dived and swooped, strewed the great ship's decks with roses. Amid tootling whistles, dinning sirens, blaring bands, and frantic shouts of "vive Laval!" the Premier of France came home and brought home Daughter Jose. To French reporters she babbled, "America is a fairyland! Its women are beautiful! Its character is best interpreted by its man-built wonders, les skyscrapers! I certainly hope to return. It is possible, however, that I shall accept an invitation to join a French expedition which is going to Timbuktu, crossing the Sahara desert in caterpillar automobiles."

The Premier, proud of himself and especially of the "free and frank" discussions which he had conducted with President Hoover, bowed right & left, embraced Cabinet Ministers who had come to greet him with abandon, kissed his men friends generally and crowed:

"French prestige never has been higher. The Americans freely admit that France is financially, economically and politically the outstanding power of Europe! This gives us obligations which I am convinced France will not fail to meet."

On his special train to Paris the Premier described these obligations as "audacious measures of rapprochement with Germany." His first act in the Capital, apart from the necessary call of respect on President Paul Doumer, was to get in touch with German Ambassador Leopold von Hoesch. As fast as possible the two statesmen will elaborate plans for Germany to take the "initiative" toward an extension of the Hoover One-Year Moratorium or some actual cancellation of Reparations and War Debts which President Hoover and Premier Laval agreed Germany must take (TIME, June 29). "President Hoover stressed and I agree," declared bubbling, vigorous M. Laval, "that recovery depends on helping Germany to get on her feet!"

All this hubbub glossed over the fact that M. Laval obtained from Mr. Hoover no guarantee of French "Security." It has been clear from the first that the Hoover Moratorium would have to be extended or some cancellation made, but the President prefers to have Europe ask Congress. As something bright and dramatic, Premier Laval announced that he would call what amounts to a new Reparations Conference in December at Biarritz!

At Biarritz in the swank Hotel du Palais, on the site of a pleasure palace of the Emperor Napoleon III, the World's leading statesmen will again decide, as they did at the Dawes Conference and again at the Young Conference, just what is "Germany's capacity to pay."

On the lie de France two French suffragets tried to convert Daughter Jose, argued that if French women are given the vote they can be depended on to always vote for peace. "French women are impulsive," retorted anti-Feminist Jose, "they could vote for war as well as peace. Many would vote contrary to their husbands in a spirit of contradiction. I would prefer a dozen babies to a seat in the Chamber of Deputies!"

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