More waste-paper baskets are to be placed in prominent positions; in the principal thoroughfarey of! Paris, in the hope that the streets will be less littered with rubbish} than they are at present. Some years ago a great effort was made for tidiness. Numerous receptacles for waste-paper, banana skins et hoc genus one were provided,. and the public were solemnly warn-against the consequences of-dropping omnibus tickets and other bits of paper. The war destroyed this excellent beginning, and since 1914 Parisians have revelled in the sensation of dropping everything that bothers them At pre sent there are only three receptacles the boulevards between © the Opera and the Faubourg Poissonniére, two on the north and one on the south side. The public have! either decided not to use them or have forgotten what they are.
An observer spent an hour the! other morning at the corner of the, Faubourg Montmartre, to see how) many people would use the basket. placed at that point. When he arrived, it contained nothing but 4 handful of ticket stubs which had evidently been deposited in it by an omnibus official. Handbill distributors were at work as usual, but' no handbills were in the receptacle made for them; they were on the pavement, or in the gutter. At, last a well-dressed man was seen} to tear up a letter and deposit the fragments in the basket. ''At last,' thought the watcher, "I have found at least one Parisian who has some, regard for the appearance of our streets!" He looked at the scraps of paper and the typewritten words abilities, play in the bands at picture palaces or night restaurants. Some even act as meat-checkers at the Central Markets. The next crop of French professional men will be small, but of good quality. Those who go through such a period of "hard living and take their degrees will be all the better for it.
A VAST DICTIONARY, M. Alexandre Ribot, whose death has just occurred, was certainly the most venerable figure in French. politics. He took them very seriously indeed, and he was credit-, ed with never having wilfully missed a sitting.
His great height, fine features, and long silvery hair and beard made him an extremely picturesque personality. His temperament contained a strain of something like Puritanism whick was just enough to make his colleagues a little afraid of him, and, in all probability, it prevented him. from being elected President of the Republic. He seemed to feel it his "Dear Sir" caught his eye. careful "Parisian" was an Englis!
The duty to purify every proposal of "his own party by subjecting it to man or an American!
AN INTELLECTUAL SLUMP, Every year a certain number of; scholarships are offered for scholars proceeding from the primary schools to the lyeees. The Minister of Public Instruction hag discover-) ed to his sorrow that these scholarships are going begging. The candidates who offer themselves for examination are very few indeed, The fact is that a slump has taken place in the intellectual spheres of, employment. People have only to, read their newspapers to find out! that Professor Branly, who contributed largely to make wireless telegraphy a practical invention, has; no laboratory and hardly enough to live on; that Dr. Vaillant, tho} X-ray expert, who has lost both his arms in the service of science, had until recently an income of Frs. 9,000 a year, which is less than the! earnings of a navvy; and so on. At: the same time, French parents seo! countless cases of more yy less uneducated men who fortunes! during the war by the mere exercise of commercial faculties and initia-! tive.
The result is that many} French parents, who would othe wise have pinched and scraped for! years to pay college. fees, now put their sons into business and make their daughters shorthand writers and. typists, The high cost of living is another! obstacle to. intellectual pursuits, and yet another is the great length of time over which a full course of study now extends: A father who' wants his son to become ai doctor or a barrister must reckon on having: to support the youth for about 16 years before he can begin to earn! searching criticism, and at the s.me time he had a curious induigerce for the views of the other side. One of his oldest colleagues once said to him, "Ribot, when you die you will go to purgatory, und you will suffer the tortures of the damned: you will hear vuises "li round you, saying nice things about your Seeing how, little M.
Ribot was to be leporided upon as a partisan, his Parliamentary suc cesses can only have been due to the respect inspired by his industry, his principles and his oratorical powers. He was even forgiven for temporarily relapsing into something very like Radicalism—ai result of his unfortunate tendency to seo the other man's point of view.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.