by our great financial institutions in the City. The Daily Telegraph's City Editor declares that "the burden of taxation after the war will assuredly be far greater if any attempt is made to conscript capital"; and he adds that the mere possibility of such a thing “will tend to check the subscriptions for war loans now." He points out, too, that when the Germans, before the war, attempted a capital levy they only secured 50 out of the estimated 123 millions. The Morning Post, in the course of a rather contemptuous article on December 27th, remarks: "The meaning is not very clear. At all events, it is not very clear to us, and we doubt if it will be clear to the public which has invested, and is investing, in War Loans. They may think it means that the Government intends to confiscate part of their loan after the war is over. We do not for a moment think that the Government means to do anything of the sort; but we think it very unfortunate that Mr. Bonar Law should have given colour to such a suspicion."

On this the Economist remarks: "It seems to us to be as clear as anything said by the present Chancellor can be that what the Post thinks he cannot have meant he did mean, with, of course, the addition that holders of all kinds of investments besides War Loan are to be similarly mulcted." Bankers are not in the habit of forming opinions very rapidly, but it may be worth while to quote from the chairman's speech at the special meeting held on January 3rd of the London and South-Western Bank. The Government, said Sir Herbert Hambling, "must beware of discouraging by hints of ill-judged taxation the men who have shown resource and adaptability in meeting war's industrial problems, from applying these qualities to the great readjustment that peace will call for. On the skill and readiness with which this readjustment is carried out will depend our power to pay for the food and material that we have to import, our power to free the pound sterling from depreciation as measured by foreign rates of exchange, our power to find employment for the workers whose war task is done." When the war is over industrial problems will be more acute than they are now. Our organisers of industry, Sir Herbert continues, have laid golden eggs in the shape of an output of war material that three years ago would have seemed incredible. "We want more golden eggs from them in the future in the shape of an equally astounding peace output. To kill these valuable geese would be an act of criminal folly. But we shall kill them if we threaten them with taxation that will drive them out of business."

I have endeavoured to show that our huge War Debt, which has led to the cry for a Capital Levy, is itself due mainly to two

causes to the enormous sums paid in wages and to the Government's failure in 1914-15 to raise revenue and enforce economy by a drastic system of war taxation imposed upon all citizens who were not fighting. The ordinary objections to a Capital Levy I have taken for granted, such as that it would penalise thrift and encourage extravagance, that it would check subscription to War Loans, that it would injure the credit of the British Government, and that it would do enormous harm to British industry.

My own objection is rather to the astounding unfairness of the proposal. If this is a war for national aims, and Mr. Sidney Webb and Mr. Lloyd George would hardly say "No," it should be paid for by the nation as a whole and not by one small class. J. E. ALLEN.

Since the above was written Mr. Bonar Law has made a statement in the House of Commons. In answer to a question by Mr. Peto, M.P. (Jan. 16th), he said that the Government had not considered the question of taxing capital and had no intention of proposing such a tax. He promised a further statement at an early date explaining his reply to Mr. Sidney Webb.

THE BLACK CABINET.

THE elaborate and effective system of espionage evolved by the Ohrana enabled the old régime to keep a close and constant watch on the development of political currents and the hatching of political plots among the masses of the Russian population. But this was not enough. The Government of the Tsars was, apparently, based on a belief in the fundamental and universal turpıtude of human nature. Absolutely no one was trusted, whatever might be his official position, social station, or political connections. All were kept under secret surveillance-Ministers, governors of provinces, generals in command of military districts, metropolitans of the Orthodox Church, even members of the Imperial family. In the nature of things it would have been very difficult for the Ohrana to suborn persons in these and similar positions to spy upon their peers, though there are good reasons for supposing that it had its agents in very unlikely quarters. However, for the purposes of "observation" in the higher official and social spheres, the Government had another and not less efficient instrument. This was the Cabinet Noir, the "Black Cabinet," as the Russians call it, translating literally the term under which such an institution first became known to history in the France of Louis XIV. The Black Cabinet was an office in which the private correspondence of persons of official, social, or political prominence was examined without the knowledge of either sender or addressee, and such portions of it as seemed likely to interest the authorities photographed or merely copied as the exigencies of the case might require.

Naturally, the Ohrana rendered ancillary service to the inquisitions of the Black Cabinet. Thus, among the documents published by the Revolutionary Government are reports which were rendered by the secret police on persons so different in character as Leo Tolstoi and Gregory Rasputin-the great exemplars, one might say, of the best and the worst that Russia has produced in our day. The document dealing with the sage of Yasnaya Poliana describes in the minutest detail all his visible. comings and goings during a visit which he paid to the Capital in February, 1897. Every day his steps were dogged by the Ohrana spies from the moment when he left the house where he was staying till the moment when he returned to it and so disappeared from observation. All his calls are faithfully recorded, and in many cases the persons on whom they were made are

described. We are told at what hour he entered the Public Library and at what he left it; how many minutes he spent in the bookshop, and how many with the tobacconist; that at the barber's he had his hair cut and his beard trimmed. All those in whose society he was seen are either named, or, if they were unknown to the spy, described with careful detail. They, too, were generally followed, and it is apologetically mentioned that one of them "was lost to sight through the breakdown of a cab." The very number of the railway carriage in which the great novelist left the city to return to his rural retreat is conscientiously set down. In slavish subjection to forms and rules, one of the spies thinks it necessary to give the following description of the best-known figure in Russia: "Above average height; sixty-five years of age; long grey beard; eyes grey; face wrinkled; dressed in a plain short tanned overcoat, plain light-brown felt hat, and brown baggy trousers." To only one of the police agents is the most illustrious man of letters Russia has produced "the well-known writer"; to the others he is "Retired Lieutenant Count Lev Nikolaievitch Tolstoi." To minds such as these any military rank, however humble and remote, took precedence over immortal fame which had not received the stamp of official approbation.

The other of the two reports mentioned covers a four-day visit paid to Moscow by Rasputin in April, 1915. It was drawn up on the instructions of General Globatcheff, the head of the Petrograd Ohrana, who notified Moscow that the "staretz" was on his way thither, and asked that he should be put under "continual and absolutely secret observation." The result is one of the few pieces of authentic documentary evidence which we have as to Rasputin's real character and his manner of passing the time when he was not posing as a saint at the Palace at Tsarskoe Selo. On the night of his arrival in Moscow, we are told, he drove out to one of the suburban restaurants, where he sat with his friends till far into the morning. During the following afternoon, "evidently under the influence of vinous vapours, he behaved himself very unrestrainedly with the housemaid (of his hostess), whom he persistently asked to kiss him." At nine o'clock that evening he "was brought out of the house exceedingly drunk, placed in a cab, and driven about various streets of the town, evidently with the object of sobering him." Later on, "unknown women, apparently singers," came to the flat where he was passing the evening, and "with their assistance the tipsy company which had gathered there conducted itself so uproariously that the other tenants of the house were compelled to apply to the landlord's representative with a petition that the dancing and noise should be stopped.". Most of the succeeding day Ras

putin devoted to calls, but at a quarter to ten in the evening "he drove off somewhere with the above-mentioned housemaid, in a hired motor-car, and he did not return till a late hour." A curious detail revealed by this report is that, in the secret nomenclature of the Ohrana, Rasputin passed under the designation of "The Dark One." As is probably well known by this time, he was, in the days when it was forbidden to mention him by name in Russian public utterances, always referred to in Parliamentary speeches and in the Press as "the dark power."

These reports show how diligently the Ohrana followed the doings of prominent people when circumstances rendered them accessible to the eyes and ears of its agents. Naturally, however, such circumstances were of comparatively infrequent occurrence. For regular information as to what was being done and said in the higher social and official circles, the Government was dependent on the Black Cabinet. This institution was absolutely illegal in its very conception, for the Russian Criminal Code forbade the unauthorised opening of other people's correspondence, but the Ministers of the Tsars paid very little heed to the laws which they themselves had made if it suited their purposes to break them. That the Cabinet existed at all was known to very few down to the Revolution, though, of course, suspicions and assumptions were general. Many public servants must have noticed that their indiscreet confidences to trusted correspondents had been immediately followed by their fall from the favour of their official superiors, but probably few of them had ventured to draw positive inferences from these coincidences. The story went about that, when Minister of the Interior, Count D. A. Tolstoi once rose from his table remarking to his guests: "You stay here-I must go and read other people's private correspondence"; but, on the other hand, another Minister of the Interior had declared in the Douma that the Black Cabinet was nothing but a legend. In any event, the vast mass of correspondence found in the archives of the Cabinet shows that innumerable men in the highest Governmental positions either did not know that letters of persons of their class were read by strange eyes during passage through the post, or flattered themselves with the belief that they, at any rate, were too implicitly trusted to be subjected to espionage of this kind. Evidently the Governor of Kiev, Count Ignatieff, who sent all his letters to his brother, the Minister of Education, by the hands of friends who happened to be travelling to Petrograd, was a rare exception. Even so shrewd and well-informed a man as Count Witte is said to have suffered much in his early career through the frank and pungent comments on public matters with which he spiced his private