Articles were published some weeks ago in the Socialist newspaper of Paris, L'Humanite, showing the corrupt relations between many French journals and the Russian Government. The documents were drawn from the achives of the Russian Foreign Office. They consisted largely of reports made by the Russian Financial Agent in Paris. He had been constituted a sort of paymaster of the forces in connection with the French Press. The whole makes up a shocking story of bribery or blackmall resorted to at the time of the flotation of successive Russian loans on the French market.

There is, to be sure, nothing particularly novel or surprising in this disclosure. Not only in France, but in other Continental countries, the relation of most newspapers to their Government, and to the Governments of foreign nations, has been different from anything known in the United States or in England. Sometimes subsidies are given direct. More often journalists have secretly been in receipt of money in return for their supposed influence. The system has been long established and perfectly familiar, but is none the less utterly reprehensible. There is no excuse for it. It brings journalism under suspicion and reproach. It will be a happy day for Continental Europe when it can point to newspapers that are self-supporting and independent and known by all to have opinions that cannot be bought.

The defense is set up that Continental newspapers could not live unless they secured from time to time funds from political aspirants, or from Governments, desiring to make use of them. The small amount of advertising carried by foreign newspapers is not sufficient, it is asserted, to enable them to meet their cost of publication. They are driven to seek financial help secretly, whether altogether legitimate or not. This may be an explanation, but it is no defense. The first duty of a self-respecting newspaper man a duty both to his own calling and to the public is to make the press what it professes to be an honest medium of news and of editorial conviction. Anything short of this is a shame and disgrace.

Fortunately. American newspapers, with whatever faults and defects they may be charged, are not open to the accusation of venality They stand on their own feet. They freely determine their own policy. Vague and unthinking complaints about a "commercialized press" fail to notice that newspapers able to live on their own income have the great moral advantage of being free from even the suspicion of venality. By comparison with the subsidized or bribed press too common in Continental Europe the "commercialized" American press has a good deal to be thankful for. N. Y. Times.