FOREWORD


To be Editor-in-Chief of one of the greatest newspapers in the world
at twenty-seven years of age is a distinction, which has been enjoyed
by few other men, if any, in the whole history of journalism. There
may have been exceptional instances, where young men by virtue of
proprietary and inherited rights, have nominally, or even actually,
succeeded to the editorial control of a great metropolitan newspaper.
But in the case of M. Stéphane Lauzanne, his assumption of duty in
1901 as Editor-in-Chief of the Paris _Matin_ was wholly the result of
exceptional achievement in journalism. Merit and ability, and not
merely friendly influences, gave him this position of unique power,
for the _Matin_ has a circulation in France of nearly two million
copies a day, and its Editor-in-Chief thereby exerts a power which it
would be difficult to over-estimate.

M. Lauzanne was born in 1874 and is a graduate of the Faculty of Law
of Paris. Believing that journalism opened to him a wider avenue of
usefulness than the legal profession, he preferred--as the event
showed most wisely--to follow a journalistic career. In this choice he
may have been guided by the fact that he was the nephew of the most
famous foreign correspondent in the history of journalism. I refer to
M. de Blowitz, who was for many years the Paris correspondent of the
London _Times_, and as such a very notable representative of the
Fourth Estate. No one ever more fully illustrated the truth of the
words which Thackeray, in Pendennis, puts into the mouth of his George
Warrington, when he and Arthur Pendennis stand in Fleet Street and
hear the rumble of the engines in the press-room. He likened the
foreign correspondents of these newspapers to the ambassadors of a