The Daily News Letter the Paris Demonstrations

PARIS.

There have been many erroneous reports concerning the recent demonstrations by French medical students against foreigners in the French universities, chiefly to the effect that the demonstrations were in protest against the presence of these foreigners, many of whom are Jews.

This is not the case. As was proven during the demonstrations, the French students do not object to the foreigners in their midst. The students fear with reason that many of the foreigners plan to remain in France after completing their courses, and practice medicine here. In view of the overcrowding of the field in France, as in America, and the great difficulty that lies in placing young physicians, the students engaged in their protests after earlier pleas to the authorities for strict application of the present citizenship laws with regard to the practice of medicine had gone unheeded.

The students demanded that there be no exemptions from the law which provides that an alien who wishes to practice the profession in France must first obtain French nationality and then take two years in a French medical college. The law also forbids the practice of medicine by anyone naturalized for less than ten years.

The students raised no objection to the foreign students using the facilities of French universities even though at the University of Paris foreign students number 20.9 per cent of the registration. They only wanted assurances that these students, many of them refugees from Germany, would not practice medicine in France later.

The demonstration had its effect. The authorities promised the students that their plaints would be considered and the students went back to their books. Now all is quiet.

Throughout the demonstrations, no foreign students were molested, all disorders involving only the striking students and the police.

Despite the presence among the strikers of numbers of members of the Camelots du Roi, the Royalist anti-Semitic organization responsible for most of the anti-Jewish clashes here in recent years, nothing of an anti-Jewish character occurred during the demonstrations. There had been some fear that the agitation might develop along anti-Jewish lines. This proved unfounded. Fascist student groups also participated.

Many French Jewish students heeded the call of the National Union of Students and took part in the demonstration.

Edmund Zalinski, enlisting in the Union Army, was promoted to a lieutenancy at the age of sixteen for gallantry in action and after the Civil War continued in the Army, where he invented a number of artillery devices.