With few letters of introduction, acclimatization was much more difficult than in London. One had to hew one’s way around by the aid of the newspapers. These are infinitely more expressive of every shade of political opinion than is the London press. They provided a complete education in the contemporary world. Supplemented by the interesting symposiums in the reviews, and the mapping-out of the various French intellectual worlds which the young _agrégés_ and instructors I met were always eager to give me, the Paris press provided a witty, interpretative daily articulation of the French mind at work. It is a very self-conscious and articulate mind, interested in the psychological artistic aspects of life rather than the objective active aspects which appeal to the English. Life to the Anglo-Saxon is what people are doing; to the Latin, rather the stream of consciousness, what individuals and also what groups are thinking and feeling. This all makes for clear thinking, constant interpretation--I noticed that my young lawyer friend was all the time saying “Voilà! mon explication!”--and an amount of what might be called social introspection that makes France the easiest as well as the most stimulating country to become acquainted with. The French are right in telling you that their scholarship is not the collection of insignificant facts, but the interpretation of significant ones, the only kind of scholarship that is worth anything. In Paris, I continued my general policy of running down the various social institutions, churches, courts, schools, political meetings, model tenements, etc., in order to get, at least, a taste of French society in operation. I poked about the various quarters of town and countryside, and talked to as many people as I could meet. After the lectures at the Sorbonne became intelligible, I followed the public courses of Bouglé and Delacroix and Burkheim in sociology, and when the campaign for the parliamentary election came I plunged into that, following the bulletin boards of the parties, with their flaring manifestoes--among them the royalists’ “A Bas La République!” calmly left posted on the government’s own official bulletin-board, as evidence of the most superb political tolerance I suppose any country has ever shown!--and attending the disorderly meetings held in the dingy playrooms of the public schoolhouses or in crowded cafés. French freedom of speech has been struggled for too long not to be prized when won, and the refusal to silence interrupters made each meeting a contest of wits and eloquence between the speaker and his audience. The most extraordinary incident of “fair play” I ever saw--Anglo-Saxons simply do not know what “fair play” is--was at one of Bouglé’s meetings, where the chairman allowed one of his political opponents, who had repeatedly interrupted Bouglé, to take the platform and hold it for half an hour, attacking Bouglé and stating his own creed. When