Extremely deplorable as must be the effect of false accusations inspired by selfish motives, a policy of the widest publicity offers great advantages over one of suppression and silence. Better fifty exposures, ten or even twenty of which are misleading, than blind concealment of official misdoing. Disproof of false charges is comparatively easy and when effectively made redounds to the prestige of the official or individual who has been unjustly assailed. As for those newspapers and periodicals which flagrantly abuse their privilege, it is seldom that they altogether escape penalties in the form of loss of influence if not of circulation. If penalties of these kinds can be made effective press censorship and _lese majeste_ laws, such as exist in autocratic governments, need never be resorted to in America. From this point of view the horror frequently expressed by continental publicists at the corruption existing in the United States appears rather equivocal. Bad as some of our political conditions may be, we at least deserve credit for our willingness, nay, our determination, to hear the worst about ourselves. Certainly there would seem to be greater hope of improvement under our policy than in a country whose chief national hero used the enormous income from the sequestered estates of the House of Hanover to fill the news and editorial columns of the “reptile” press with lying articles favourable to his policies, and in which only recently the facts concerning the Camarilla surrounding the Emperor were so cautiously and partially brought to light. And it is well known that in Russia the censorship was deliberately used by provincial bureaucrats to conceal their misdeeds from the knowledge of the Czar.