North Carolina Newspapers

The news in ttiis publi cation is released for the press on receipt. THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA NEWS LETTER Published Weekly by the University of North Caro lina for the University Ex tension Division. august 13, 1924 CHAPEL HILL, N. C. THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS VOL. X, NO. 39 ^Editorial BoarJi B. C. Branson, 3. H. Hobbs. Jr.. L. R. Wilson. B. W. BCnierbt, D. D. Carroll, J. B. Bnllltt H. W. Odom. Bntored as aeeond-clasB matter Norambor 14,1914, atthaPoatofflceatChapalEQlI, N. C.. nndar tba aetof Ao^aat 24, 1931 IMPORTANT FRENCH PROBLEMS XXXV-FEEDING GAY PAREE Between ten at night and five in the morning the right of way in street travel and traffic in Paris is surren dered to the farm carts that swarm into the city from every direction in multi plied thousands, for all the world like swallows circling into a colony roost on an autumn evening. Every night in all seasons and weathers, in rain, snow, sleet or hail, these swarms of farm carts may be seen heading into the great Central Market northeast of the Louvre and only four or five short blocks away from it. No matter how crowded the streets may be in the rush of theatre hours, everything halts to let the farm carts pass-electric trams, taxicabs, autobuses, trucks and private motor cars, whatnit—and no traffic cops are needed. It is the custom of centuries. Apparently it grew out of the fact that nine times in ten the drivers are asleep. These farm carts, by the way, are lumbering vehicles with high wheels and high square bodies with sloping sides filled with carrots, pars ley roots, salsify, cauliflower, cel ery roots, cress, lettuce heads, and other salads of the winter months. The roots are scrubbed and shining, but whatever the vegetables the cart is full and not only full but piled high above the top in appetizing array. Evidently the carts are loaded with care to catch the eye of buyers in the market place and to tempt alert jobbers at once upon arrival; in which case there is no bother about unloading and stacking the vegetables in artistic piles in the street spaces around the market pavilions. A narrow board is given to the farm venders each in his two or three square meters of space, for which he pays two or three cents of rent each morning. Whoever will may buy direct from the curb market in these early morning hours, but mainly the purchasers are the store keepers in the fruit and vegetable pavilion, the whole salers, the jobbers and the food-shop people all over the city, the push-cart peddlers, the buyers for the hotels and pensions, the venders in the little open- air markets set up two or three times a week for the convenience of house keepers in the various quarters of Paris. Meantime the stall keepers in the pavilions are buying in and ar ranging their daily exhibit of food stuffs of all sorts. At eight o’clock each morning the curb market closes and the pavilion markets begin to do business, mainly with retail purchas ers. Displays of Art The pavilions of the Halles Centrales are ten or more, I forget the exact number, and each pavilion is devoted to a specific purpose, one to fruits and vegetables, one to meats, game and poultry, another to butter, eggs and cheese, another to fish and other sea foods, another to flowers and decorative leaves, another to horseflesh, and so on and on. If you want to get a notion of the instinctive artistic taste of Paris ians at the foot of the social scale, you have only to walk through the pavilion devoted to meats, poultry and game. The stalls of these Little People, as the French phrase goes, looks like the display in a florist’s window. Each stall I completely washed away by eleven I o’clock by the streams of hydrant water that reaches every inch of the pavilion floors and the surrounding streets. They are all shining clean by twelve o’clock of every day. After which hour there is little vending in the pavilions and none at all in the curb markets of the surrounding streets. The stall keepers during the lull are tidying up their wares for the next morning sales and installing the new purchases of the early hours of the next market day. The first of my four visits to the Halles Centrales was made af five o’clock in the morning and lasted till ten. I was accompanied by a Sorbonne student, a French professor in one of our middle western colleges. We were piloted through this great establishment by a mandataire who for twenty-five years has been connected with it in one or another capacity. He knew all the farmers and all the dealers in every pavilion and could give me instant an swers to every possible inquiry. He could but he didn’t. Instead he explod ed in a hysteria,of speech, shrugs, and gestures at every inquiry. And the explanation is that a Frenchman unconsciously assumes that whatever is French is perfect. TheseStwo words are one in France, and.|any question about anything French suggests a criticism, whereupon you have not an answer but an oration. Even my French interpreter from Indiana threw up his hands in despair and let the mandataire reach his climaxes without interruption. on the front of each cart, and at one I keeper vies with every other in tempt. end of this seat the driver rigs up windshield of coarse cloth. Then he stretches himself out comfortably right up against the haunches of his horse and goes to sleep. His horse knows the route through the winding streets of Paris and probably could find his way along to the market place blindfold. He pulls his heavy load with his head down to his knees and marches through the street traffic in the crowded crossings with all the dig nity of a supreme court judge. He looks neither to the right nor left and stops in deference to nobody nor anything. The driver’s jolty nap is ended when the cart comes to ar stop for he knows that his long journey is at an end. I may say that he is usually asleep on these night trips to the market place because he has been gathering his load all day and packing it into his cart in the evening and early night hours. He is literally too tired to stay awake on his trip into town. It is an unwritten law in Paris that the market carts must be respected, and to run into one of these vehicles means short shrift in the police courts. The French Wife Rules Roost I was so fascinated by this spectacle the first I time saw it on a cold November night in 1923 that I stood for an hour watching the stream of in termittent vegetable carts making their way across the Boulevard Haussmann and along the Champs Elysees and other thoroughfares near my pension. These streams of market carts pour into the street spaces surrounding the ten or more pavilions of the great Central Market, the Halles as the French say, the Belly of Paris, in Zola’s rough 'phrase. At once upon arrival the vegetables and fruits are unloaded and attractively stacked on the sidewalks and in the streets to a narrow driveway in the mid dle. The open street spaces around the great market buildings extend in every direction for three or four blocks, and from eleven at night until five next morning the drivers and their wives are busy arranging their wares for their own particular sales to direct customers. And the wives must not be left out of the story. They are always at hand when any money comes into the family purse, for in peasant or bourgeois homes in France the wife is a business partner, the cashier, the account- keeper, and commonly the business manager, whatever the business may happen to be. The first and earliest market period, from five to eight. ing the eye and appetite of buyers, Everything gross and repellent dis appears in these butcher shop arrays. The shanks of mutton cutlets will be dressed in paper pantaloons with ruf fles. The neck bones of the lamb carcasses will be hidden with paper rosettes. The cuts of boneless pork will be rolled and tied with colored strings. The whole effect of the shop is dainty and picturesque. But such is the artistic aspect of everything else that is offered for sale in the various pavilions of the great central market. While looking through the butcher pavillion of the Halles Centrales I could not help recalling my visit to the meat market of the Butchers’ Guild in Augsburg in Bavaria, Germany. It was one of the earliest meat markets' built in Europe. I managed to edge into the center of it but I bad to back out in a hurry with my eyes shut and my handkerchief clamped to my nose and mouth. The streams of blood everywhere, the filth on the floor, the odor of offal and the Beelzebub plague of flies were more than my senses could bear. The market was crowded with purchasers, Germans of course, but nothing appeared to offend their noses and stomachs.. Nothing like it or re motely suggesting it did I ever see in any meat market anywhere in France. The German food stores, the delicates sen shops, are another story. They are distinctly attractive and appetizing but they do not begin to equal the wizardries of art displayed in the food shops of Paris. Not Quite Up-to-Date The pavilions of the Halles Centrales cover, I should say, twenty or more acres. They are of open steel con struction on concrete foundations with concrete cellars underlying the entire market space. These cellars are ap parently little used except by the rats. And the explanation lies in the fact that each day’s business disposes of the day’s income of food. There is very little left over for warehousing over night after the daily sales, and the individual refrigerators in the cellars are mainly devoted to small lots of but ter, cheese, eggs and game. No muni cipal refrigeration on a large scale is in evidence in these cellars. And moreover there is no screening against flies and no protection against the dust of the streets for the.foods in the mar ket stalls. As for dust there is little of it at any time, and as for the grime of the streets and floors in the busy early hours of the market day, it is The Mandataire’s Hard Job Themandataires|are state officials re presenting the Minister of Agriculture. They stand for fair play between sellers and consumers. It is their business to look after the inspection and rejection of foodstuffs, to supervise the collection of stall rents in the pavilions and space rents in the adjacent streets, to make daily reports of prices and quantities, to hold down the cost of living in a fractious city without discouraging pro ducers and shippers on the one hand and on the other to raise the market prices whenever they are not enticing enough to keep ^he food supplies of Paris coming in steady’daily streams. These fonctionaaires have a very im portant job, and without them the or derly filling of the Paris stomach would be impossible. For unlike most other great cities, New York say, the daily business of feeding Paris is centralized and completely systematized, so that it is easy to know in quite definite detail just what the daily market bill of the city is. Gar^antua’s Daily Meal For instance, we know that at pres ent Paris eats 720,000 pounds of meat, poultry and game, day by day on an average the year through, 420,000 pounds of sea foods, snails, and cray fish, 372,000 pounds of butter, eggs and cheese, 663,000 pounds of vegeta bles and fruit. The business in the central market is right around $1,000, 000 a day, which pays for about two and one half million pounds of food. Just as fruits, vegetables, and flowers are delivered daily in the farm carts of the regions around about Paris, so swift produce trains come into the market pavilions from the farthest reaches of France bringing the dailyjsupply of fish, poultry, game, sea foods, snails, cheese, butter, eggs and the like. Snails and SuchliKe Dainties Among other things it is the business of themandataires to see that Paris gets 26,000 pounds of edible snails daily, 14,000 pounds of lobsters, shrimp and crayfish, 20,000 pounds of oysters, and 40,000 pounds of mussels. These food dainties must not overstock the market, and scant supplies must not be offered at prohibitive prices. Paris wants its 26,000 pounds of snails every day, and there is an ominous growl if they are not on hand within reach of the purses of rich and poor alike. It is a small de tail but a snail shortage'and impossible prices claim as much space in the Paris newspapers as any other detail of the daily food supply. I summoned cour age sufficient to order snails for dinner at Pocardi’s—Burgundy snails, the choicest of snails, the snails that feed daintily upon the grape leaves of the Burgundy wine regions. I fancied that I could eat at least a half dozen but when they were set before me their size was appalling. My first snail was delicious in flavor and taste, and I chest- ily crowed over the timid members of my family until I discovered that I was chewing India rubber or something very like it. I finally got it down but I felt like Thackeray when he swallowed his first big American oyster. “I feel”, said he, “as though I had just swal lowed a baby.” I wanted to try the fresh water mussels and the crayfish. They looked appetizing but I could not summon the courage to attack them. No Cooperative MarKeting I asked my genial conductor through the Halles Centrales in my first early morning visit whether or not the farm ers were selling their products.Jcoop- eratively through their own agents or in their own stalls in the pavilion. His answer was No, that such marketing was at present forbidden by law. “If they sell in the pavilions of the Halles Centrales,” said he, “they must sell through wholesalers and jobbers and pay commissions of from 10 to 26 per cent of the sale prices. Commonly the the farmers sell their fruits and^ vege tables on their farms to dealers who go out to buy them in bulk in the fields, and these buyers in the main are the people who cart them to the market and display them for sale during the vegetable market hours each morning. Only a very few farmers cart their own produce to market. The thous ands of sellers you see in the streets i are not farmers, but mainly middle- j men who buy from the farmers to sell in the' open spaces around the Halles Centrales.” Which means that the Danish farmers long ago learned what the fruit and vegetable farmers around Paris have not yet learned, namely to sell their own produce through their own cooperative agents. If they had cooperative mar keting organizations they could not do business in Paris under the law of the land. However it is fair lo say that the French farmers have been cooper ating in one way or another since 1868, that the Great War gave great impetus to the movement, that one and a half million farmers are now learning coop eration in the French Society of Agri culture, and that the next half century is likely to change the business-end of farming in France as in Denmark. The French Farmers'jAre Rich But since 1914 the French farmers have the whip-end of things. They have been in command of a sellers market the last ten years. If market prices do not suit them then they do not sell and Paris goes hungry in little ways or large, whereupon an ugly growl which the Minister of Agriculture must hear. His mandataires must get busy and tip off the wholesalers and jobbers that prices must go up just enough to tempt the farmers to supply the daily needs of the Paris stomach. The Minister of Agriculture • is the official price-fixer oL food stuffs, with full authority to raise or lower the charges for pantry supplies. And he is forever between the Devil and the deep sea, for on the one hand he must keep the cost of living low enough to please Paris, and on the other he must keep prices high enough to satisfy the food producers of France. He must blow hot and cold in the same breath every minute of the time. If anybody on earth could have been equal to such a feat of legerdemain it was the last Minister of Agriculture. But he failed and so he walked the plank along with all the rest of Poincare’s cabinet in the elections of last May. Like the German farmers the French farmers are richer today than they ever were before in all their lives. And they feel their oats. They get maxi mum prices and therefore they see no great need for the elaborate marketing machinery of the cooperating Danes. As a rule cooperation begins in dire proverty and success begins in pinching necessity. Experience is a dear school but the farmers of every land learn in no other. The report of the mandataires is that such a thing as a poor farmer is not known in all France.—E. C. Branson, Paris. THE FRENCH UPHEAVAL The recent overturn of the French government which swept the Poincare ministry^out of power and the Socialist groups in was a peasants’ and “little people’s” revolt, Dr. E. C. Branson told his class in rural social economics at the U.A.C. National Summer school. Dr. Branson, who holds the Kenan pro fessorship of rural economics and sociol ogy at the University of North Carolina, spent the months of February, 1923, to March, 1924, studying conditions in ru ral Germany, Denmark, and France. The French peasant, acording to Dr. Branson, lives for the most part in dire proverty. Usually this poverty is self-imposed by pinching parsimony, the farmer denying himself and his family even the common decencies in order to keep “ahead of the game”. No matter how he lives he must come through with a small surplus of money for his hoard. A National Trait “Miserliness, which is occasional with us, is almost a universal trait of the French peasantry and bourgeoisie”, de clared Professor Branson. “They slave and save and starve in order to hoard money, which is either hidden away or invested in some sort of government bonds or industrial security. The lower and middle class family always has money in its purse, and not to have it is an unspeakable disgrace. “This nation-wide thrift makes France one of the most important banking countries in the world. The French banker always deals in stocks and bonds of his own and all other countries, and his greatest business is to tempt the peasants and other money hoarders to invest in what they con sider dead-sure propositions promising large dividends.” Anger is Aroused With sa large a part of the population depending upon fixed interest payments for its income, the speaker pointed out that the drastic depreciation of the ' franc was bound to arouse the anger of the peasantry and little people as the owners of small repair shops and other businesses are called. “Thefrane fell to 20 percent of its normal value in the money markets of the world”, said he, “so that the actual purchasing power of the income of the small investor amounted to only one- fifth of what it was before the war. In addition, France faced a huge total debt of all sorts, and Poincare was proposing to increase taxes by 20 per cent for the purpose of balancing the budget and- maintaining an expensive military establishment. “The result was that the peasantry and bourgeoisie were in a vicious mood which was so evident that on October 14 of last year 1 predicted the early over- thrdw of Poincare who stubbornly stood in the way of restoring business sta bility in Europe. With the franc go ing down, taxes going up, and the cost of living trebled in Paris a revolt was certain at some early day.” Revolution Loomed The election last spring was charater- ized by Dr. Branson as the greatest up heaval that has occurred in France during the last forty years. “If it had not come when and as it did, ’ ’ he added, “the alternative would probably have been another revolution.” The speaker painted a marked con trast between the condition of the peasantry of Germany and that of France. “The German peasant is just as thrifty as the French., but his thrift takes a different form. Where the Frenchman invests in some form of commercial security, the German puts his money into productive properties of various kinds. He was shrewd enough to know that the mark was de clining in value so he got rid of it just as quickly as possible. During the period of inflation every cent of his surplus went immediately into farm machinery, livestock, additional land or home improvements and always in to debt paying. He cleared his slate with cheap money. German Prosperity “The result is that never before have the rural districts of Germany shown such prosperity as they do today. While there is acute distress in many of the German cities, the rural districts are enjoying almost inconceivable pro sperity. “To the suffering in the industrial centers the German peasant is callously indifferent. He gives nothing away and does not scruple to demand the top price for everything he sells, regard less of the distress of the buyer. “Herriot’s problem is collecting German reparations in gold. ' If he fails to do that he is gone, because France long ago issued bonds based on Germany’s promise to pay, sold them to French investors mainly, and used the money to restore her stricken war areas, to maintain her war establishment, to loan in multiplied millions to her allies, Poland, Czecho-Slovakia and the rest, to balance her budgets and so on and on. If Herriot fails to put German gold into the French treasury, France is bankrupt, the franc will go the way of the mark, the hoards and securi ties of the French masses will go up in smoke, and Herriot will furnish a good deal of the smoke. There’s the rub in his accepting the Dawes report. In this matter he must stand for all that Poincare stood for. If he accepts anything less his ministry is doomed. The milk in the cocoanut in France is money—the money of the masses who love money beyond everything else, I had almost said, even more than they love La Patrie.”—Deseret News, Salt Lake City.