The Prussian Government is engaged in a sort of crusade •
against the Press for disrespectful remarks upon the recent. speech of the Emperor-King, the Public Prosecutor demanding penal sentences upon the editors. Even the Cologne Gazette has been prosecuted, for the first time, and that on the charge of lese-majeste, which involves serious consequences. The Emperor has, moreover, ordered the exclusion of the Cologne paper from all palaces. The editor of the Frankfurter Zeitung is also to be prosecuted on the same charge. All this is a. little weak, considering that the prosecutor claims God for an ally ; but we are bound to admit that, from the Continental point of view, the Frankfurter Zeitung was a little rash. It indirectly compared the Emperor to Nero, not as the blood- thirsty butcher, but as the artist who was always seeking the impossible. Nero, says the German journalist, "was vain_ glorious with a mania for greatness. He was impulsive, and had hallucinations and accesses of geniality, a typical form of a decadent majesty." No Public Prosecutor charged to pre- vent libel on a crowned head would pass those sentences by
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