Elysian Fields

M. Jean Chiappe, Prefect of Police of Paris (see INTERNATIONAL), issued an order, with approval of the Municipal Council of Paris, which ran thus:

". . . Owners of buildings on the Champs Elysees will remove promptly from their roofs all electric signs except such as may advertise goods actually on sale in the premises over which a given sign is erected. . . ."

At this order devotees of beauty and of Paris rejoiced. The Champs Elysees ("Elysian Fields") are at one end an oblong park of magnificent foliage and at the other a street recently as exclusively residential as was upper Fifth Avenue, Manhattan. Most of the signs which glared upon the Elysian Fields up to last week advertised such products-not-sold-on-the-premises as the Austrian tooth preparation Odol and were blatantly objectionable.

Advertisers ruefully recalled that only small electric signs may be displayed on Fifth Avenue, and that onetime President William Howard Taft signed an executive order on Sept. 8, 1911 which makes the frontage of the Panama Canal one of the few U. S. regions where electric signs may not be legally erected.

Travellers to the Orient via the Suez Canal are dazzled by the huge electric billboard which informs at least 200,000 persons yearly that they ought to buy Sir Thomas Lipton's tea.