The decrease of production appears to have been principally caused by excessive taxation. The working of the Siberian gold districts is divided between the Government and private owners, and in the division, the eastern side of the mountains has been retained by the former, whilst the latter have worked the western. The result has been an immense loss to the public treasury, for whilst two-fifths of the washings of the Oural are from the government reserves, the Altai districts do not yield above 5 to 6 per cent. of this produce. The Russian government has endeavoured to collect by taxation what is lost either by abstraction or the washings. The tax was at first one-tenth of the net produce; it was then raised to 15 per cent., and has since been further increased. The new tax, however, only applies to Siberia, east and west. It is a progressive rate, divided amongst ten classes, the rate varying from 5 per cent. on the raw produce, when the working was from one to two pouds, up to 32 per cent. when the working amounted to 50 pouds per annum. The whole tax, however, was, in addition to another tax called “minier,” also progressive, and varying, according to class, from four to [69]ten roubles per pound of gold. These exorbitant taxes may have acted in two ways, either as an encouragement to fraud, or as a discouragement to production. At the distance at which we live from Siberia, a country where the light of public opinion has penetrated even less than the rays of the sun, it is difficult to decide between these two consequences, both perhaps equally probable. But the fact of the decrease remains undoubted, and this decrease has been to the extent of one-seventh in three years, or about [70]4,000 kilogrammes.