conversations, the secrets of private letters are violated.  Arrangements are made that certain telegrams shall arrive too late, and spies are delegated to the most private meetings.  At a recent gathering of members of the National Press, two spies were surprised, and another was discovered at the Federation of the Radical Committees of the Oise."[82] But neither the signature of the Treaty nor its ratification by Germany occasioned the slightest modification in the system of restrictions.  Paris continued in a state of siege and the censors were the busiest bureaucrats in the capital.

One undesirable result of this regime of keeping the public in the dark and indoctrinating it in the views always narrow, and sometimes mischievous, which the authorities desired it to hold, was that the absurdities which were allowed to appear with the hall-mark of censorship were often believed to emanate directly from the government.  Britons and Americans versed in the books of the New Testament were shocked or amused when told that the censor had allowed the following passage to appear in an eloquent speech delivered by the ex-Premier, M. Painleve:  “As Hall Caine, the great American poet, has put it, ’O death, where is thy sting?  O grave, where is thy victory?’"[83]

Every conceivable precaution was taken against the leakage of information respecting what was going on in the Council of Ten.  Notwithstanding this, the French papers contrived now and again, during the first couple of months, to publish scraps of news calculated to convey to the public a faint notion of the proceedings, until one day a Nationalist organ boldly announced that the British Premier had disagreed with the expert commission and with his own colleagues on the subject of Dantzig and refused to give way.  This paragraph irritated the British statesman, who made a scene at the next meeting of the Council.  “There is,” he is reported to have exclaimed, “some one among us here who is unmindful of his obligations,” and while uttering these and other much stronger words he eyed severely a certain mild individual who is said to have trembled all over during the philippic.  He also launched out into a violent diatribe against various French journals which had criticized his views on Poland and his method of carrying them in council, and he went so far as to threaten to have the Conference transferred to a neutral country.  In conclusion he demanded an investigation into the origin of the leakage of information and the adoption of severe disciplinary measures against the journalists who published the disclosures.[84] Thenceforward the Council of Ten was suspended and its place taken by a smaller and more secret conclave of Five, Four, or Three, according as the state of the plenipotentiaries’ health, the requirements of their home politics, or their relations among themselves caused one or two to quit Paris temporarily.