"What Puffing Eagle say T f*H� say he blow bigger ring If we sand-urn Sweet Cops."
SWEET CAPORAL CIGARETTES
n:>!.. f
Great European
Uy Ooorge Slocombo, In The Sow York Herald Tribune
Ceaadfcui Jewish Rerisw Is the only Jewish psbtteation in Csasee hi say language reeehiaff ths Jewish coahssnlty which is te clsfaa aieaibership fat the Audit Boreas of drcnUtions.
Leon Blum,, s gremt European, perhaps ths hut of the great Europeans, is seventy-four and until this spring of 1946, had never previously crossed the Atlantic. Hs wss to have visited the United States in the spring of 1989, but on the eve of his planned departure, Hitler marched into Prague and during the six years which followed, the only journeys Blum mads were msde, as s fugitive from or a prisoner of the Germans. Unpredictably, he escaped the fate of his fellow Jew, Georges MandeL
He carries his age gallantly, with undiminished intellectual powers and astonishing physical energy. He also carries, almost alone among the living, the last unbroken tradition of the great adventurous tides of European Socialism which died with Jean Jaures, whose friend and disciple he was. There can be few surviv-
ing Americans who saw and heard the orator Jaures, although in Chicago I met a man of Armenian origin who remembers having been expelled from a Turkish college in the days of the Sultan Abdul the Damned for hanging a photograph of the Frenchman above his bed.
Of the political and literary Paris of Clemenoeau, Vivian!, Ar-istlde Briand, Poincare, Millerand, Emile Zola, Anatole France and the Dreyfus case, the notable survivors can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Leon Blum is one of them. He is therefore one of the Fourth French Republic's few living links with the great days of the Third Republic.
In a special sense, since his party, dominating both the Constituent Assembly and the provisional government of President Felix Gouin, provides the arch of the political edifice in the new France, Blum's experience is the
yardstick by which the new government most be measured. He is the only lesder of the government tsl majority in ths Chamber (although his leadership is moral snd intellectual rather than physical since he is not a member of the Assembly), who presided over s government before World War II snd who led the principal opposition party during the critical years after World War L
The Leon Blum of those remote days wss the most caricatured politician in France. His physical characteristics then were a sheer gift to the newspaper cartoonist. He had a long, lean face like a lantern. His mustachios drooped Hke those of a ham actor in the 1860's. He wore rimless eyeglasses, a wide-brimmed black hat, very pointed black shoes and a black string tie.
When he tore the financial policy of Raymond Poincare to ribbons from the tribune of the Palais Bourbon, his brilliant logic and intellectual integrity impressed his fellow deputies more powerfully than his rhetoric, which was notably deficient In a parha-
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WE ARE A
C�f ilA W act an ccuuap^Havnil nrfofi* of the World
of wartime prices. This great record was made possible
by the wholehearted co-operation of the Canadian people their Government's anti-inflation measures. Now that the war is
with
� �� ���� -. ... *'.*. �
over, Canada's fine record should be maintained ... by moderating our pleasures, by controlling unessential
spending, we continue to serve our nation and others best.
The staple necessities of life have priority calls on our money and our efforts. Unnecessary spending at this time will bid up
prices on everything that is still scarce and will serve only to devalue all our personal wealth and that of the nation.
The House of Seagram for many years has advocated moderation and
now suggests its continued careful observance in these times.
Let moderation in all we do be the keynote for lasting stability.
mi*.
1 TP
I'll II
THE HOUSE OF SEAGRAM
see
e^PwswsWJSr
raent so often held spellbound va> der ths matchless voice and lyr�>;.^';. ism of Aristide Briand. ;
Blum today has lost his lean and hungry Csssius-like look of ths 1920's. He has mellowed and put on the firm reassuring contours of an elderly banker. Vanished are the romantic hat, the black sctor's clothes and the black string tie* He now wears horn-rimmed spectacles snd gray tweeds. There is little outwardly to associate him with the literary salons of Paris that the elegant young dramatic critic of "Le Matin" frequented in the years before the first world war when the thundering dialectic of Jean Jaures filled the Chamber' of Deputies and Anatole France dallied deliciously in front of the bookstalls on the- quays of the Seine or caressed his fragments of Greek marbles in the Villa Said.
His friend Marcel Proust, is dead and the vogue of Proust, In * France at least, is almost forgotten. The erstwhile young lawyer and Master of Requests of the Conseil d'Etat, the dilettante of those early years who wrote poetry and essays in literary criticism and books on companionate marriage, has lived through two world-shaking wars,1 the martyrdom of his race, the military collapse, humiliation and bitter ordeal of his country to find his once scornfully derided political opinions accepted by more than one-third of his countrymen and himself the political guide, counsellor and elder statesman of the young republic.
Leon Blum is the only Jew tq have been Premier of France, and there is an obvious temptation to compare him with the British Jew Disraeli, who in his immature years played with literature and advocated a modest form of Socialism. But to the one, age brought only disillusionment snd cynicism, whereas Blum seems to have kept his idealism intact and even to hsve come out of a German prison without rancor against the Germans* if without iHusioas con-corning them
HIS Industry 1m stitt
the Bocisfot.
laireM since he stepped ee&i*:< eral de Gaulle's personal phase Oriy Airfield in the jail-spring of 1946.
The constitution of the Fourth Republic will be largely, if not entirely, of his inspiration. President Fehx Gouin is his disciple snd friend. He was also, after Blum's return from Germany, his host. For Blum found his old apartment on the tree-shaded De St Louis partly WTecked^his boohs and papers destroyed or carried away, his furniture and pietares gone. Since his liberation hs has been living as the guest of the President of the Assembly ia a small apartment under the reef ef an annex of Maris de Medfcfs Palace of Luxembourg.
When the peace conference meets in that historic snd lovely old building which the home of the French the plenipotentiaries wRl have Leon Blum for a near neighbor. They will meet in him a suiiisei of the great days of France's eat-ture and world prestige, a wit, wide sympathies and ship and the political leader of a whole geaeratiea of
and
's great speech ia Us de-. fense at the trial of Riom was the. first sign that isslsfsats to Vfcfcy and the Germans wi in France. Morally, his was never greater than Ur had Ms fast behind bars.
His is one of the few rJoeed and aulaeiitatrve in France, now that Gaulle has shaken frees his fast ths dust of ths pofitkal Hs rsfasel to blesses a ate for slsctisa te the sai hs has office ts bath
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