The explanation [Transcriber: original 'explaantion'] of this attitude of complete detachment lies, no doubt, chiefly in the fact that the men who make and exchange political opinions have gone to Bordeaux, while most of those who create and guide public (as distinct from political) opinion, have exchanged the pen for the sword. Just as Paris, for want of bakers, has only one kind of bread, so, for want of the men who usually inspire public opinion, her press has concentrated upon one absorbing idea, ecraser les allemands. Moreover, for want of printers and of advertisers, most of the daily papers have now dwindled to microscopic proportions. The virile intelligence of Paris journalism and the nimble and adventurous inquisitiveness, which are its normally distinguishing characteristics, have gone, like everything else, to the front. As the editor of the Gil Blas says in a farewell poster to his subscribers: "Youth has only one duty to perform in these days. Our chief and all the staff have joined the colors. Whenever events shall permit, Gil Blas will resume its cheerful way. A bien-tot." *France and England As Seen in War Time* *An Interview With F. Hopkinson Smith.* [From THE NEW YORK TIMES SUNDAY MAGAZINE, Dec. 6, 1914.] F. Hopkinson Smith was in France when the war broke out, he spent September in London, and is now back in New York. He has brought home many sketches. Not sketches which suggest war in the least, but which were made with the thought of the war lurking in the background. "Curiously enough," he said, without waiting for any opening question from THE TIMES reporter--Mr. Smith often interviews himself--"curiously enough, I was on my way to Rheims to make a sketch of the Cathedral when the war broke out. I had started out to make a series of sketches of the great European cathedrals. Not etchings, but charcoal sketches. "Let me say here, too, that cathedrals for the most part ought not to be etched. You lose too many shadows, though you gain in line; but in the etching you have to cross-hatch so heavily with ink that the result is just ink, and not shadow at all. Charcoal gives you depth and transparency. I was eager to do a series of the cathedrals, as I had done a series for the Dickens and Thackeray books, and had planned to give my, entire Summer to it. "I had been in London for some time. I had sketched in Westminster, in St. Bartholomew's. Everything peaceful and quiet. It seems now as if we ought to have felt--all of us, the people on the streets, I, shopkeepers, every one--the approach of this tremendous war. But we didn't, of course. No one in England had the faintest suspicion that this terrible inhuman thing was going to happen.