“Zbe spectator," gobemba 16th, 1850
PASSPORT ANNOYANCES
THE Premier, in enumerating at the Lord Mayor's banquet the municipal superiorities foreign visitors to the Exhibition would find, might have= included in the list exemption from passport obstructions. It is a nuisance, which, like the plague of burglary, typhus, influenza, and other autumnal visitations, regularly undergoes newspaper audit at the close of every tour- ing season, and then slumbersundisturbed till the next. At present, from meliorations introduced or promised, and the conflicting returns of travellers, it is not easy to collect precisely the existing routine generally op the Continent ; but the practice can be stated, from recent experience, in one territorial section, and that the most frequented. To visit France no passport is requisite, but it is in order to leave it ; at least after an excursion- into the interior. On application to the French Consulate in London, a person would be told no passport is necessary to go to Paris ; which is true, but not the whole truth. A Londoner might land at Havre, travel by rail to Paris, and take up his abode there, and a passport would not be asked for ; but he would be stopped in his egress from the republic without a permit, and a permit to embark would not be granted without the production of a passport. If he visited the Louvre on a week-day (on Sunday it is open to all without question), he would be asked for his passport, and b3k.enter his name and address, as at the British Museum ; or in traversing the rooms of theHbtel de Ville he might be required to produce it. It is not easy to see the advan- tage the French Government derives from persistence in the passport system.
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