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On November 26, 1936, the Popular Front Ministry of France, of which Leon Blum was President of the Council, submitted to the Chamber of Deputies a series of proposed laws which would have completely changed the regulations regarding the press. With only slight modifications the Chamber accepted the proposals, but Senate amendments removed the bill's teeth, and a deadlock ensued between the two houses of the French parliament. This deadlock remained unbroken until establishment of government by decree. Subsequently several attempts were made to secure passage of bills which embodied certain features of the Blum proposals, or which in some other manner suggested changes in the existing press regulations, but they too were either rejected or postponed. To a considerable extent, press susceptibility to venality results from the fact that it is very difficult for a French journal to be a paying concern by using merely ordinary channels of revenue. Low prices for daily papers have become traditional in France, but, more important than that, advertising has never developed into the gold mine for the press that it has become in the United States and in England.

This article has briefly directed attention to the salient character traits of three nations England, France and the U.S. in relation to democracy. To the peculiar habits of each have been attributed the differences in their democracies, but it would hardly do to rest the case there. For there is every evidence that significant character changes are taking place and beginning to manifest themselves in all three nations. These changes, moreover, appear to be very similar and so bid fair to make all more alike politically. Under the capitalistic industrial system, the common man is being regimented, organized, robbed of responsibility, denied opportunity for initiative, and made a part of a great social machine. Thus he is being forced into habits of irresponsibility, dependence, obedience, and servitude. He is being standardized too much the same pattern everywhere. In the U.S. for example, uniformity of behavior is rapidly approaching among the mass of urban dwellers. There is little pride in individuality of thought or act, but an ambition on the part of everyone to be like his neighbor. This conformity apparently has its main root in conditions of work and living, which deny opportunities of free choice and the exercise of individual judgment. Wherever such conditions prevail, there tends to develop a dependent type of man who, having little experience of it, will have little interest in political liberty as such. The idea of liberty has long since lost currency, and hence credit among them. The faith of ancestors is dead and the institution of created by their fathers has died or will die with it. The same thing to a greater or less degree is happening in France and England, and if that were the case, liberty is going to disappear, largely, from the scene.

The article examines the economic consequences of war and inflation in England, France, Germany and the U.S. since 1790. The Napoleonic wars, the American Civil War, the Great War of 1914-18, and the Second World War have all been accompanied by major price upheavals in all of the four great Western Powers. English, French and German wholesale price rises of the World War I period were greater that all previous wholesale price increases in the 150-year period. U.S. wholesale prices advanced only by four percent during World War II. The forces that have governed price behavior during wartime and immediate postwar inflationary periods are discussed.