13 MAY 1871, Page 2

The mistake about the armistice between Versailles and Paris which

we mentioned last week was not the fault of the Manchester

(uardian. Its correspondent telegraphed it as a rumour, and it was the correspondent of the Pall Mall Gazette in Manchester who retelegraphed it as a fact. We should mention also that the Lombard Association did not telegraph the story, as some people seem from our paragraph to have imagined. We only intended to criticize the telegrams published by those two authorities as too sensational, which they most certainly are. Reuter's fault in peace times is stupidity, and in war times official bias; and we suppose the explanation of all the failures is, that work which it would take statesmen to do perfectly has to be done either by clerks or by men who can only repeat what they hear.