Smugglers' Field Day

The Government was having other troubles, too. Some 100,000 Treasury employes had gone on strike. Amateur and professional smugglers were having a field day at uncontrolled frontiers. At the small Belgian frontier town of Menin, enterprising Frenchmen crossed and recrossed the border as much as eight times a day to bring back Belgium's plentiful cigarets, chocolate, coffee, oranges, and other commodities rare in France. Smugglers of gold, diamonds and currency sauntered across the frontier with bulging suitcases. Police refused to stop them for fear of being considered strikebreakers.

In a vote of confidence, the Assembly supported the Government's refusal to grant strikers an immediate wage boost. But headaches were only beginning: long-suffering functionaries of the Ministry of National Education--and even the police --threatened to join the strike this week.

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