A CORRESPONDENT writes to us to-day about the doings of the Russian secret police in London and their close association with Scotland Yard. Two distinct charges are made. One is that prominent refugees who are disliked by the Okhrana, or Russian secret police agents, are not able to get naturalisation papers here. The other is that, although of course there is no arrest, there is an amount of watching and besetting of these refugees which destroys their peace of mind.

We agree with our correspondent that both these complaints, if well grounded, are a reflection on the boast of England that she is an asylum of freedom. It may well be that the distinction between political and ordinary crime is less marked in other and less free countries than it is here, but so it has always been; an agitation, to be purely constitutional, presupposes a certain amount of political liberty. But in international affairs our policy has always been to draw this line, and pretty strictly too. The inquiry is not whether the refugee has committed an offence under foreign law, but whether his motives would have led him to commit crime under English law and under English political conditions. The distinction is a rational one, for our object is to give free asylum to everyone who is capable of conforming to our laws and of making a good British subject.

The police, uninstructed, are not the right people to draw these distinctions between political crime, which in some countries may be morally laudable, or at any rate not deserving of our censure, and ordinary crime, which is everywhere blameworthy and punishable. Nor do we recognise any intermediate state between freedom and police surveillance. If a foreigner is fit to breathe the air of England at all he should have all the personal and natural rights of British subjects.