lse. There was no guarantee that a message paid for would
even be sent by the telegraph-operators, or, if withheld, that the
sender would be apprised of its suppression. The war arrangements were
retained during the armistice. And they were superlatively bad. A
committee appointed by the Chamber of Deputies to inquire into the
matter officially, reported that,[29] at the Paris Telegraph Bureau
alone, 40,000 despatches were held back every day--40,000 a day, or
58,400,000 in four years! And from the capital alone. The majority of
them were never delivered, and the others were distributed after great
delay. The despatches which were retained were, in the main, thrown into
a basket, and, when the accumulation had become too great, were
destroyed. The Control Section never made any inquiry, and neither the
senders nor those to whom the despatches were addressed were ever
informed.[30] Even important messages of neutral ambassadors in Rome and
London fell under the ban. The recklessness of these censors, who ceased
even to read what they destroyed, was such that they held up and made
away with state orders transmitted by the great munitions factories, and
one of these was constrained to close down because it was unable to
obtain certain materials in time.

The French Ambassador in Switzerland reported that, owing to these
holocausts, important messages from that country, containing orders for
the French national loan, never reached their destination, in
consequence of which the French nation lost from ten to twenty million
francs. And even the letters and telegrams that were actually passed
were so carelessly handled that many of them were lost on the way or
delayed until they became meaningless to the addressee. So, for
instance, an official letter despatched by the Minister of Commerce to
the Minister of Finance in Paris was sent to Calcutta, where the French
Consul-General came across it, and had it directed back to Paris. The
correspondent of the _Echo de Paris_, who was sent to Switzerland by his
journal, was forbidden by law to carry more than one thousand francs
over the frontier, nor was the management of the journal permitted to
forward to him more than two hundred francs at a time. And when a
telegram was given up in Paris, crediting him with two hundred francs,
it was stopped by the censor. Eleven days were let go by without
informing the persons concerned. When the administrator of the journal
questioned the chie