surprised, and another was discovered at the Federation of the Radical
Committees of the Oise."[82] But neither the signature of the Treaty nor
its ratification by Germany occasioned the slightest modification in the
system of restrictions. Paris continued in a state of siege and the
censors were the busiest bureaucrats in the capital.

One undesirable result of this regime of keeping the public in the dark
and indoctrinating it in the views always narrow, and sometimes
mischievous, which the authorities desired it to hold, was that the
absurdities which were allowed to appear with the hall-mark of
censorship were often believed to emanate directly from the government.
Britons and Americans versed in the books of the New Testament were
shocked or amused when told that the censor had allowed the following
passage to appear in an eloquent speech delivered by the ex-Premier, M.
Painleve: "As Hall Caine, the great American poet, has put it, 'O death,
where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?'"[83]

Every conceivable precaution was taken against the leakage of
information respecting what was going on in the Council of Ten.
Notwithstanding this, the French papers contrived now and again, during
the first couple of months, to publish scraps of news calculated to
convey to the public a faint notion of the proceedings, until one day a
Nationalist organ boldly announced that the British Premier had
disagreed with the expert commission and with his own colleagues on the
subject of Dantzig and refused to give way. This paragraph irritated the
British statesman, who made a scene at the next meeting of the Council.
"There is," he is reported to have exclaimed, "some one among us here
who is unmindful of his obligations," and while uttering these and other
much stronger words he eyed severely a certain mild individual who is
said to have trembled all over during the philippic. He also launched
out into a violent diatribe against various French journals which had
criticized his views on Poland and his method of carrying them in
council, and he went so far as to threaten to have the Conference
transferred to a neutral country. In conclusion he demanded an
investigation into the origin of the leakage of information and the
adoption of severe disciplinary measures against the journalists who
published the disclosures.[84] Thenceforward the Council of Ten was
suspended and its place taken by a smaller and more secret conclave of