In theory, of course, the proceedings of the Cabinet are absolutely secret. The Privy Councillor's oath prohibits all disclosures. No record is kept of the business done. The door is guarded by vigilant attendants against possible eavesdroppers. The dispatch-boxes which constantly circulate between Cabinet Ministers, carrying confidential matters, are carefully locked with special keys, said to date from the administration of Mr. Pitt; and the possession of these keys constitutes admission into what Lord Beaconsfield called "the circles of high initiation." Yet in reality more leaks out than is supposed. In the Cabinet of 1880-5 the leakage to the press was systematic and continuous. Even Mr. Gladstone, the stiffest of sticklers for official reticence, held that a Cabinet Minister might impart his secrets to his wife and his Private Secretary. The wives of official men are not always as trustworthy as Mrs. Bucket in _Bleak House_, and some of the Private Secretaries in the Government of 1880 were little more than boys. Two members of that Cabinet were notorious for their free communications to the press, and it was often remarked that the _Birmingham Daily Post_ was peculiarly well informed. A noble Lord who held a high office, and who, though the most pompous, was not the wisest of mankind, was habitually a victim to a certain journalist of known enterprise, who used to waylay him outside Downing Street and accost him with jaunty confidence: "Well, Lord----, so you have settled on so-and-so after all?" The noble lord, astonished that the Cabinet's decision was already public property, would reply, "As you know so much, there can be no harm in telling the rest"; and the journalist, grinning like a dog, ran off to print the precious morsel in a special edition of the _Millbank Gazette_. Mr. Justin McCarthy could, I believe, tell a curious story of a highly important piece of foreign intelligence communicated by a Minister to the _Daily News_; of a resulting question in the House of Commons; and of the same Minister's emphatic declaration that no effort should be wanting to trace this violator of official confidence and bring him to condign punishment.