margin, when he returned the report to the intendant, "Good--express
satisfaction." If it was more than sufficient, he wrote, "Good--express
satisfaction and sensibility." There is nothing new under the sun. In
1761, the Government, jealous enough of newspapers, determined to start
one for itself, and for that purpose took under its tutelage the _Gazette
de France_. So the public newsmongers were of course to be the
provincial intendants, and their sub-newsmongers, of course, the
sub-delegates.

But alas! the poor sub-delegates seem to have found either very little
news, or very little which it was politic to publish. One reports that a
smuggler of salt has been hung, and has displayed great courage; another
that a woman in his district has had three girls at a birth; another that
a dreadful storm has happened, but--has done no mischief; a fourth--living
in some specially favoured Utopia--declares that in spite of all his
efforts he has found nothing worth recording, but that he himself will
subscribe to so useful a journal, and will exhort all respectable persons
to follow his example: in spite of which loyal endeavours, the journal
seems to have proved a failure, to the great disgust of the king and his
minister, who had of course expected to secure fine weather by nailing,
like the schoolboy before a holiday, the hand of the weather-glass.

Well had it been, if the intermeddling of this bureaucracy had stopped
there. But, by a process of evocation (as it was called), more and more
causes, criminal as well as civil, were withdrawn from the regular
tribunals, to those of the intendants and the Council. Before the
intendant all the lower order of people were generally sent for trial.
Bread-riots were a common cause of such trials, and M. de Tocqueville
asserts that he has found sentences, delivered by the intendant, and a
local council chosen by himself, by which men were condemned to the