CHIPS.

THE RUSSIAN BUDGET.

We feel the cost of war, and know that it must be absolutely more expensive to the Russian than it is to our own. How long is the Russian pocket? how strong is the Russian arm? are very natural questions. A German gentleman in the United States, long resident in Russia, has published a report upon the subject not altogether tallying with some other reports that come to us from the Old World by way of the New. The account Mr. Donai gives is nearly to the following effect:

Fifty millions of Russian subjects yield to their Czar not more than a revenue of twenty millions sterling. More cannot be extracted from the people; and, out of this, a large army of soldiers is not, it stands to reason, too liberally paid. Every member of the Russian population, taking one with another, pays eight shillings a year for being ruled imperially, with little or nothing more to pay for local government of any kind. In the same way, every Austrian pays twelve shillings; every Prussian eighteen shillings; every Frenchman forty-four shillings; and every Englishman forty-eight shillings to the resources of the nation, besides considerable sums towards local expenditure. Public expenses suggest, roughly, a nation’s wealth, and Russia, judged by this test, is inhabited by a people manifestly poor. Whenever war arises, therefore, the Czar goes abroad to borrow, and there is, every year, a deficiency in the imperial budget. If all the European money-lenders buttoned up their pockets closely, Russian war must cease. How these loan contractors will ever get back more than interest on capital, it is not easy to see; for, if borrowing continues, even the receipt of interest by them may become precarious.

The only direct tax in Russia is the poll tax, yielding less than three-and-a-half millions sterling; add to it the license-duty paid by merchants and tradesmen, and the sum becomes five millions. We speak only of pounds sterling, because the value of sums stated in silver roubles (the national denomination in which Russian accounts are computed) is less clearly perceived. The customs’ duties yield five millions more to the revenue; and these duties fall entirely on the upper classes; as the Russian peasant does not make any appreciable use of foreign goods. Crown estates yield less than three millions and a half; and under the head crown estates are included mines, forests, and gold-washings, with nearly half the estates in the empire, the real annual profit obtained from each crown peasant being not more than three shillings and fourpence. The rest of the imperial revenue is extracted from the sale of brandy.

The Czar is the great brandy-merchant to his people. The brandy trade is his monopoly, and his chief means of livelihood as a potentate. Before he took to the spirit-trade, licenses for the distillation and retailing of brandy used to be always sold to the same persons, who acquired enormous wealth by their transactions. Government, aware of this, reduced their profits by conditions and changes which at last drove out of the market all but those persons who carried on a wholesale business on the largest scale. A few hundred wholesale distilling firms, too deeply concerned in their trade to bring it to a stand-still, carried on their business at the mercy of the emperor; who soon ordered that all brandy produced by the distillers should be sold to the government, which then doubled its quantity with water, and supplied it to licensed dealers for retail sale—of course, after more dilution—at fixed prices to the public. Licenses are sold by auction, and their prices are often run up by agents of the government; so that speculators in them are almost as likely to be ruined as to thrive.

Much has been said of a mysterious treasure belonging to the crown, yearly augmented by a procession of millions of roubles to the vaults of the fortress of Saint Petersburg. Mr. Donai does not believe in this problematical deposit of wealth; because its sources, being such as have been here detailed including borrowed money, cannot accumulate. Borrowers are not usually people whose coffers overflow with millions. The real truth is that the Russian government gets money as savages get fruit, by cutting down the tree; and lives upon capital as well as interest. The loan of last year may have covered the interest of former loans, and perhaps the cost of arms purchased in Belgium; but even that is not certain, for six issues of paper money have already been forced into currency; private contributions have been claimed and urged upon the people from the pulpit with no very great result; and this reminds us that one source of money to the Czar has not been named in the preceding summary. It is the Russian church. There remains the bag of money in the pocket of the church. When, in eighteen hundred and forty-five, the empress was to go to Italy, the clergy paid a contribution of two millions—the price of the forcible conversion of the peasants in the Baltic provinces. The present war is set forth as a holy war, and the church may be asked fairly to assist in paying for it, and no doubt is asked very perseveringly, and for no small sums. But how heavy is the purse of the Russian church? Its contents used to be valued at twenty-six millions sterling; and, although the holy fathers may contribute even to the last farthing, we unfortunately know that twenty-six millions are soon swallowed up when a great war is being waged.

Thus the case is said to stand as regards money. It is not any better in respect of men. In time of war the Russians do not abhor military service as they do in time of peace; because they are then better treated, and have prospects of advancement. But it appears that the Russians do not make a soldier fit to be led against the enemy until after several years’ drilling. Deduct from the Czar’s million of men four hundred thousand that can form lines only on paper, and three hundred thousand destroyed in the present struggle, only three hundred thousand old soldiers remain to cover the whole frontier, north, south, east, and west. Another campaign will destroy them nearly all, and there will remain nothing but an army of recruits. Fanaticism may be infused into these by abolishing serfdom, and by other home appeals; but their fighting powers will be very low indeed at the end of another campaign. To urge on the war, therefore, without giving time for a recovery of breath, is to destroy the attacking power of the Russian empire; and all the arts and all the diplomacy at its command—and they are both numerous and skilful—ever have been and ever will be to gain time. Time is, with Russia, nearly synonymous with victory.

Its defensive power nobody is disposed to under-estimate. In this matter, its real weakness gives it, in one sense, special strength. Steppes, swamps, and vast regions almost destitute of roads, a bad climate, a thin population barely civilised that vanishes before approaching hosts and leaves only a desert for the enemy to traverse, are obstacles that exist now as they existed in the days of Pultawa and Moscow. Upon this the Czar reposes his last trust. But every condition of the empire is such as to cause its vital parts to be rather upon its western and southern borders than in its more central parts. Drive the people into the inhospitable interior, and their difficulties of subsistence will be only a little less insurmountable than those of an enemy. Indeed, of the prodigious superficies over which the empire extends—including, as it does, nearly one-seventh part of the terrestrial globe—by far the greatest proportion is uninhabitable to friend or foe. The enormous northern provinces, especially, are destined to perpetual sterility, not only on account of the extreme rigour of the climate, but because nearly all the great rivers by which they are traversed fall into the Arctic Ocean; and are therefore inaccessible for the whole or a greater part of the year. We may live to see, therefore, that the Muscovite tradition of defence is quite as vain a trust as most of the traditions blindly followed in these days, unless the peace now in course of negotiation be lasting and secure.

The interruption—nay, the paralysis—of commerce occasioned by the present war is another source of exhaustion. Except for ordinary necessaries of life, Russia draws her supplies from foreign countries in exchange for raw material produced from the estates of the nobles. She has such endless supplies of timber that to give an idea of some of her forests, it is said, as a specimen, that a squirrel might hop from Saint Petersburg to Moscow from tree to tree without touching the ground, and that she could, under a rational system, afford illimitable tallow, hemp, and oil; but these sources of wealth are impeded and crippled very naturally when nearly every port she possesses along her limited sea-board is blockaded.

A SMALL MONKISH RELIC.

No more than a few months have elapsed since the greatest Greek scholar of the day, the Reverend Doctor Gaisford, late Dean of Christchurch, Oxford, was carried to his last resting-place within the walls of the ancient cathedral over which he had presided so many years. The students of the house, clad in white surplices, preceded the remains of their venerated Dean as the procession passed along the east side of the quadrangle, from the deanery to the cathedral. Great Tom had, by tolling every minute (a thing never done except at the death of the sovereign or the dean), announced the decease; and now a small land-bell, carried in front of the procession by the dean’s verger, and tolled every half-minute, announced that the last rites were about to take place.

The cathedral clock struck four; the usual merry peal of bells for evening prayers was silent. We strolled towards the cathedral, and finding a side-door open, walked in. The dull, harsh, and grating sound of the workmen filling up the grave struck heavily on our ears, as it resounded through the body of the church. The mourners were all gone; and alone, at the head of the grave, watching vacantly the busy labourers, stood the white-headed old verger; another hour, the ground would be all levelled, and the stones replaced over the master he had served faithfully so many years.

The verger informed us that the ground now opened had not been moved for two hundred years, and that a dean had not been buried within the precincts of the church for nearly one hundred years. Bearing these facts in mind, we poked about among the earth which had been thrown out of the grave. We found among the brick-bats and rubbish a few broken portions of human bones, which had evidently been buried very many years; but fastened on to one of the brick-bats we discovered a little bone which we at once pronounced not to be human. It was a little round bone, about the size of a large shirt-stud, from the centre of which projected a longish, tooth-like spine, the end of which still remained as sharp as a needle, and the enamel which covered it still resisted a scratch from a knife. The actual body of the bone was very light and brittle, and a simple test we applied showed that it had been under ground very many years.

The question arose, what was our bone, and how did it get to the place where it was found? It was shown to the greatest authority we have in comparative anatomy, and he immediately pronounced it to be a spine from the back of a very large fish, commonly known as the skate or thornback. This creature has, fixed into the skin of his back in a row along the back of his tail, many very sharp prickles of a tooth-like character, and covered with enamel, just like our specimen. If one of these skin-teeth be cut out from a recent fish, the stud-like knob of bone into which the spine is fixed, will be found, serving to keep this formidable weapon (for such it is) in its proper position; and dreadful blows can Mr. Thornback give with his armed tail in his battles, be they submarine, or be they in the fisherman’s boat.

How did the spine of a thornback get into Christchurch Cathedral, into ground that had not been moved for two hundred years? Before the days of Henry the Eighth the precincts, where the college now stands, were occupied by monkish buildings, where monks had many fast-days, and, on these days, were probably great consumers of fish. The supply of fresh-water fish, from the Thames close by, would hardly be equal to the demand. It is therefore probable that they procured salt-water fish, and a thornback is, above all fish, the most likely to have been supplied by the fishmonger.

In an old book on fishes and serpents, we found, unexpectedly, evidence to prove that the skate—a hundred years ago—formed a favourite dish at the high tables of the colleges. The book was published in seventeen hundred and sixty-three, and the passage runs thus: “The skate, or flaire, is remarkably large, and will sometimes weigh above one hundred pounds; but what is still more extraordinary, there was one sold by a fishmonger at Cambridge to St. John’s College, which weighed two hundred pounds, and dined one hundred and twenty people. The length was forty-two inches, and the breadth thirty-one inches.”

The monkish cook—like a cook of the present day—would, probably, skin and cut off the tail of the thornback, when he cooked him for the monks’ dinner, and then he would probably throw both skin and tail, spines and all, into the rubbish-hole outside the kitchen; there they would remain till removed. And, next, when did this removal take place? A curious book—Collectanea Curiosa—published at Oxford in seventeen hundred and eighty-one, tells us. In this book there is an article entitled, “Out of the journal book of the expences of all the buildings of Christ Church College, Oxon, which I had of Mr. Pore, of Blechinton.”

The second item runs thus: “Spent about the femerell of the new kitchen and sundry gutters pertaining to the same, xviijs. viijd.”

Further on we find, “Paid to Thomas Hewister, for carriage of earth and rubble from the fayre gate, and the new stepull to fill the ditches, on the backside of the college, clvj. loads, at a peny the load by computation, xiijs.”

Again: “Paid to Mr. David Griffith, Priest, for his stipend for wages, as well for keeping of the monastery of St. Frideswide, and saying of Divine service after the suppression of the same unto the first stalling of the dean and canons in the said college, as for his labours in overseeing the workmen dayly labouring there in all by the space of thirteen months, vij £.”

From this evidence it will appear that for a considerable space of time (probably about five years) many alterations were made, and much earth removed from place to place. The cathedral, and, in fact, nearly all the quadrangle—as will appear by comparing their levels with that of the street outside—stand upon made ground. It is probable, therefore, that some of the earth from outside the monkish kitchen, or other rubbish hole, was carted to form the floor of the cathedral, and with it, of course, any rubbish that happened to be there.

This, then, was the fate of our thornback’s spine. The thornback was eaten by the monks of St. Frideswide, the spine thrown away, unheeded, unregarded, to be disinterred, after the lapse of more than three hundred years, at the funeral of a college dean, and finally to be honoured by having its history recorded in Household Words.