May Day passed more quietly than usual in Paris. Communists tore up a few paving blocks in the workers' quarter on the left Bank, dug trenches, and built bonfires, but the gendarmerie were equal to the situation, and checked incipient parades. "For the first time in many years on a May Day," reports say, "there were taxicabs in plenty on the streets,"--perhaps a more real menace to the citizenry than parades themselves, if we remember our fiacres. So peaceful was the day that correspondents did not see fit even to mention the state of health of "Smiling Gaston's" Ministry.

But it is a safe guess that his Cabinet, like all French Cabinets before it, is in a bad way, and that before long there will be more hair-tearing and grinding of molars in the Chambers. The support given to an emergency Cabinet, and the prestige of its veteran, good-natured leader, can only stave off for a time the woes to which France's parliamentary system dooms her. The wide acclaim of Doumergue's accession has nothing to do with the case, for he is wedded to a Cabinet system with a caricature of responsibility. Only the President, with senatorial approval, can dissolve the Chambers, and call, as in England, for a decision between Ins and Outs; and this has been attempted but once in the Third Republic. Like all Premiers before him, Doumergue cannot force groups of unruly Deputies to choose-between him and an appeal to the people in which they may lose their seats; but since the groups have therefore full power to under mine and overthrow the Cabinet, they abound and multiply.

So France is at the mercy of her ten parties. Not one of them has ever secured a majority of the Chamber; and every Government has been a coalition. In 55 years she has had 68 cabinets, lasting on an average nine and one-half months. Only eight held power longer than two years; only four men in France's last half century can point to as much as four years' total service as premier.

Periods of emergency, such as confront Doumergue, have vouchsafed a few Cabinets two, or once, three years. But the average Cabinet is a mere coalition, whose chief preoccupation is not to make legislative history, to drive through well-formulated policies, but to keep alive, by ingenious jockeying, for perhaps as long as nine months. The Premier has but a shadow of Roosevelt's or the Prime Minister's influence his ministers are his "personal rivals of yesterday and tomorrow," only waiting until a new alignment of the Deputies will give one of them his own nine months' trick at the helm.

The Depression, the fear of a Nazi Mittel Europs, the agitation of Communists and the nagging of Royalists, the national ire aroused by the scandal, may give Doumergue a year or so. But the cards are stacked against him; only let France catch its breath and a new scandal, a blunder in judgment, will find a host of Deputies ready for a new "calculation" to form a new Cabinet, and another, and another. Only when France gives her Premier the club of Dissolution will the Deputies coalesce into two great parties, one to criticize and one to lead--to formulate and drive to the statute book the comprehensive legislative programs which the times demand.