innocent or criminal, and was carefully preserved in the archives of the Prefecture. There were thousands and thousands of these, carefully catalogued and filed for easy reference, made up of confidential and calumniating reports sent in by agents, sometimes serious charges, often the merest and most mendacious tittle-tattle. The most harmless individuals were often denounced as conspirators, and an agent, if he knew nothing positive, drew liberally on his imagination for his facts. Great numbers of these _dossiers_ were destroyed in the incendiary fires of the Commune; some of its leaders were no doubt anxious that no such records should remain. The criminal classes also rejoiced, but not for long. One of the first acts of the authorities when order was re-established was to reconstitute the criminal _dossiers_, a work of immense toil, necessitating reference to all the archives of prisons and tribunals. Within a couple of years some five million slips were got together, and the documents filled eight thousand boxes. It is to be feared that the secret police is still active in Paris, even under a free Republic; secret funds are still produced to pay agents; among all classes of society spies may be found even to-day; in drawing-rooms and in the servants' hall, at one's elbow in the theatre, among journalists, in the army, and in the best professions. That this is no exaggeration may be gathered from the fact that the _dossiers_ are still in process of manufacture. M. Andrieux, a former prefect, who has published his Reminiscences, describes how on taking office the first visitor he received was his chief clerk who, according to the regular custom, put his _dossier_ into his hands. "It bore the number 14,207," M. Andrieux tells us, "and I have it now in my library, bound, with all the gross calumnies and truculent denunciations that form the basis of such documents."
The regular police organisation, that which preserves order, checks evil-doing, and "runs in" malefactors, falls naturally and broadly into two grand divisions, the administrative and the active, the police "in the office" and the police "out of doors." The first attends to the clerical business, voluminous and incessant, for Frenchmen are the slaves of a routine which goes round and round like clockwork. There is an army of clerks in the numerous bureaus, hundreds of those patient Government employees, the _ronds de cuir_, as they are contemptuously called, because they sit for choice on round leather cushions, writing and filling in forms