react on the absolute impartiality of a jury, which should be a first necessity of any criminal trial in any country, for numbers of newspapers will tell them what they ought to do and what their verdict ought to be. The procedure of a French criminal trial in the court of assizes in Paris is attended with considerable pomp. In the Caillaux case as in the cases of a sensational nature which have preceded it, the rush for tickets of admission to the trial will be enormous. Response to this demand for tickets to hear and to witness the trial rests entirely in the hands of the judge who presides over the proceedings. He is able to admit, to standing room behind the bench, such friends of his own as he cares to admit, and he decides on the number of tickets of admission to the body of the court, which are distributed to the Press. The body of the court is supposed to be reserved for the Press and for the witnesses. In actual fact, as every barrister in robes is by reason of his profession entitled to admission to the court, barristers overflow from the seats reserved for the Bar and crowd the Press benches and the witnesses terribly, and far too many tickets are invariably distributed to members of the detective force in plain clothes who become “journalists” for the occasion. The public who have no particular privileges are admitted to a small space at the back of the court, through a small door in the Palace of Justice which is set apart for the purpose. In the trial of Madame Steinheil long queues waited all night for admission to this small enclosure, although the hundreds who waited knew beforehand that very few of them would get in, and in the Caillaux case we are likely to see similar strings of well dressed society folk subjecting themselves to the hardships of waiting all night in the streets for a few hours’ sensation. The assize court is presided over by the President and two assistant judges. These three men in all the mediæval glories of their red robes and quaint brimless caps, trimmed with ermine, sit at a long table on a platform at the upper end. The court-room is a long parallelogram with beautiful dark oak panelling and ugly green paper above it. The top half of the room, which is reserved for the court, the table with the _pièces à conviction_ (Madame Caillaux’s revolver, for instance), the jury, and the Bar, behind which is the dock, is divided from the lower half of the room where the witnesses, the Press, and the public sit or stand, by an oaken barrier with a gate in the middle of it. Immediately in front of this gate, plumb in the centre and facing the table at which the judges sit, is the bar to which witnesses are called. Witnesses, after they have given evidence, go and sit on the seats beyond the barrier till the end of the trial. A witness stands facing the judge, and has on his immediate right the prisoner’s lawyers and above them the dock in which the prisoner stands.