Second Saving?

Able young King Leopold again showed last week the tough metal of his Royal House. His late great father, King Albert, early picked and largely trained for the present job of Premier of Belgium sagacious young Economist Paul van Zeeland who recently conferred with President Roosevelt in Washington (TIME, July 5), and under whose management Belgian recovery has made astonishing strides. Because the Premier is more of a statesman than a politician, King Leopold has several times strongly intervened, as the late King

Albert used to do, to help Belgium's Cabinet weather political squalls. The squall into which His Majesty plunged last week was easily the most ominous to date.

Premier van Zeeland, shortly before he left Brussels for Washington last month as an economic emissary for Britain and France as well as his own country, was naturally much preoccupied with his mission, and permitted his Cabinet to be persuaded by militant Flemish Nationalists to introduce and rush through the Belgian Chamber just before he sailed a most controversial Amnesty Bill. This bill goes back to early days of the World War, when many Flemist Nationalists, eager at all times to set up Flanders as an independent country apart from Belgium, were duped into thinking Imperial Germany would aid their separation. They consequently gave much aid and comfort in Flanders to the invading German Army. For such acts of "treachery" many of King Albert's Flemish subjects were condemned to varying prison terms and many, when they got out of jail, remained deprived of their civil rights, unable to vote in Belgian elections. To end this state of affairs and let bygones be bygones, is the purpose of the Amnesty Law (TIME, June 14), but ever since being enacted it has been strenuously backfiring.

Last week Belgian War veterans continued to stage protest demonstrations in various parts of the Kingdom, dramatically tearing their War medals off their breasts and flinging them down, to indicate that their War sacrifice seems to them in vain now that Flemish "traitors" have been amnestied. They kept this up even after King Leopold roundly told them: "You saved Belgium once before, and now you must save Belgium again!" (by keeping quiet). Although Minister of Justice Victor de Laveleye, administrator of the Amnesty Law, is himself a decorated War veteran, he recently emerged from an official visit to the Mons Law Courts nursing a bleeding jaw. Later, during a commemorative service at the Brussels Law Courts, the arrival of the Minister of Justice caused all War veteran lawyers to arise and stalk from the building. Veterans associations now ban from their meetings every Deputy and Senator who voted for the Amnesty, no matter how distinguished his War record.

Last week Minister of Justice de Laveleye handed his resignation to Premier van Zeeland who then, motored to the Royal Palace, entered the modernistic office of King Leopold through its sliding steel doors, advanced to the monarch's highly polished desk with its rows of gleaming private telephone connectors, and handed His Majesty the resignation of the whole Cabinet. This was a gesture upon which King and Premier had agreed, as emphasizing the resentment felt by His Majesty's Government against those forces which had compelled the Minister of Justice to resign. Leopold III promptly refused to accept the Cabinet's resignation and the Premier thus strongly backed by his King, announced: "I associate myself fully with the views of the Minister of Justice!"

Nevertheless the resignation of M. de Laveleye was accepted by the King, and this tactical sop to opponents of Amnesty foreshadowed a period of political haggling, possible compromise and modification of the law. Brussels wiseacres agreed that the hard-headed Belgian public has been totally unimpressed, one way or the other, by Premier van Zeeland's grand transatlantic mission. They consider that M. & Mme van Zeeland have had harmless White House fun, that their Premier must now once more devote himself exclusively to Belgium's earnest knitting.

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