ing secret documents or opinions, when, it is most inconvenient (to use a moderate word) to Cabinets or Councils that their proceedings should be known, and yet when means can be found of overcoming somebody's honour, honesty, or sense of duty, and of obtaining surreptitiously what official prescription has anxiously endeavoured to veil from public view.
I am led to these reflections by the premature disclosure, which occurred last autumn, of the heads of a Redistribution Bill which had been drawn up by a committee of the Cabinet. But I soon look back to the earlier betrayal of the proceedings of the Berlin Conference in 1878. And then I return still farther into the past, and think of the mysterious publication (in 1848, as I think) of the letter addressed by the first Duke of Wellington to Sir John Burgoyne, then Inspector-General of Fortifications, on the subject of our defences. Burgoyne was the last man in the world to make an improper use of a public document; and it may be assumed, without argument, that he had no idea that the document was in dishonest hands, until after it was in anybody's hands who was willing to pay sixpence for it. He probably could not avoid communicating to the Master-General of the Ordnance and others that he had received such a letter. Some artful person, by theft or cunning, got possession of the paper, copied it, and sold the copy to a newspaper. The story current was, that a lady of some notoriety, by gross misrepresentation, and by a solemn promise that no improper use should be made of it, obtained possession of the letter for an hour from a member of Burgoyne's family, who took it from his desk. One may imagine the state of mind of Sir John when he had to go to the Duke, who had always thought highly of him, and to try to make his peace after such an unhappy occurrence. "Take damned good care you never let another letter of mine to you find its way into print!" were said to have been his Grace's words which ended the interview.
The Berlin Treaty disclosure was known to have been made by a temporarily employed clerk in the English Foreign Office. It seems to be a sad reproach to us of the nineteenth century, that we cannot secure the inviolability of our State papers and transactions. Richelieus, Fredericks, Metternichs, could avoid such exposure, to say nothing of the older Cabinets of the Escurial under Philip II., or of Venice in the days of our Tudor sovereigns. Yet we moderns, in the great age of invention, with all appliances and means at our disposal, cannot guard ourselves against the curious who will pay. Probably our inability in this respect may be traced to the manner of making Government appointments, to which our parliamentary system forces us. Had our Ministers the power of arbitrarily appointing and dismissing the secretaries, clerks, and others in their departments, they might find means of keeping these assistants faithful to their trusts. But with the mode of appointment now in fashion, and with the difficulties that lie in the way of getting rid of a public servant though he may be grievously suspected, it can hardly be but that affairs of State are now and then confided to employés who prove to be corruptible.
If the same kind of treachery was not complained of in earlier days, that probably was because there was then no ready market for stolen papers. That there were always weak natures ready to sac-
