The Times of Friday publishes a letter from its Paris
correspondent in which he comes very near • to revealing the ultimate secret of the Dreyfus case. It appears that a sum of £40,000 a year is regularly paid to the Ministry of War for secret service, and that the distribution of this money has been under the control of the Archivist . and Colonel Henry. To whom they paid it is not said, the War Office keeping the secret jealously, but either a quantity was wasted in buying rubbishy " information " at once -thrown into the waste-paper basket, or the rubbish was really bought at one rate and entered in accounts at another. In one instance, moreover, to which Colonel Picquart testifies, the Ministry assigned a special sum of £4,000 for intelligence, the money was paid to General Billot, then Minister of War, but except as to £920, there is no record of where it went. General Gonse himself inquired after this money, but with no result. Forty thousand a year is a large sum to entrust to the unchecked control of a minute group of officers, wretchedly paid for their rank, forced to live in a city like Paris, and imbued, we fancy, with a tradition that one use of a Secret Service Fund is to provide in special cases the pay which the nation is too democratic to grant.
