Another reform in French criminal procedure which many Frenchmen think necessary is the suppression of the freedom of the jury during the trial. There is a curious disregard of rules and regulations during the details of a big criminal trial in France. There are witnesses who, in response to the judge’s remark after he has asked the witness to swear to tell the truth without fear and without hatred, and to state name, address, and age, in response to the three words “Make your deposition” which give the witness a free head, behave just like racehorses when the starting gate goes up. Lawyer witnesses particularly have been known to make long speeches for the defence or for the prosecution on the plea of giving evidence, and there are many other similar abuses. It often happens, too, that evidence which the examining magistrate has collected is never sifted at the trial itself. When the trial is over, when the Public Prosecutor, the counsel for the defence, and, if the prisoner has anything to say, the prisoner, have addressed the court, the jury retires to consider the verdict. There is something oddly, picturesquely, emphatic and impressive in the mechanism of this retirement. Somehow or another the French have a peculiar knack of stage-managing anything and everything. No visitor on his first visit to Paris fails to remark the wonderful stage-management (I suppose I ought to call it landscape gardening) of the city. Look at the Tuileries Gardens when dusk is just closing in towards the end of a fine day. The whole place breathes the history of the last days of the Empire, and has the gentle melancholy of a Turner picture. Stop in the Avenue des Champs Elysées where the Avenue Nicholas II. intersects it. Look up the Avenue and down it. The Arc de Triomphe and the Place de la Concorde, which, when it ceased to be the Place Royale, held the scaffold of a king of France. Look out across the Seine, then turn and look behind you. The bridge which is named after a murdered Czar of Russia and the Invalides beyond it. Behind you the Palace of the Elysée, the home of the President of the third Republic, facing Napoleon’s Tomb. At every turn in Paris, north, east, west, or south, you get signs of this half-unconscious national gift of staging effects.