of the Débats is over. It once held the first place as an intellectual and political paper, but it has lost all vitality, and it has become that unacceptable thing in such an atmosphere as Paris, démodé. Few of its subscribers have remained faithful to it, and only one or two of its distinguished contributors.
The Débats, like the Temps, is eminently respectable, and never uses that recognised weapon of French journalism, calumny, which makes the loss of its prestige on political grounds to be deplored. For, in its method of fighting its political campaigns, the French Press to-day has descended to strange depths of dishevelled freedom. Under the Second Empire the Press had hardly more liberty than that which it enjoyed under the iron heel of Napoleon, and the supervision exercised by the censor in songs, plays, pamphlets, and literature was assuredly of greater benefit to the nation, even when making allowances for errors of judgment, than the coarse and outrageous licence permitted under the Third Republic. It was nothing but an act of stupid prudery to have taken proceedings against a grave masterpiece like Madame Bovary, but the Public Prosecutor, M. Bulot, should certainly have taken measures to summon before a court of justice M. Octave Mirbeau for writing such an irredeemable study as Le Journal d'une Femme de Chambre. The working-man, the artisan,
