Last week we were misled into believing that the offence
of Mr. Horan, the American correspondent in Paris who procured and published the secret document containing part of the Anglo-French cotnpromise, was a relatively small one, and that he was being wrongly made a scapegoat. We based our belief on the support which was given to Mr. Horan by the Anglo-American Press Association Committee in Paris. Since then, however, the Committee has withdrawn its support as the French authorities convinced it that Mr. Horan's offence was much graver than he had admitted. He said originally that his employer, Mr. Hearst, had given him the document and instructed him to transmit it to America in the ordinary course of his duties. The French authorities state, however, that Mr. Horan confessed to having paid a French journalist a large sum to persuade a French official at the Quai d'Orsay to let him see the document.
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