21 SEPTEMBER 1918, Page 2

There is grave reason to fear that the Russian Empress

and her four daughters, as the Daily Telegraph stated on Friday week, have been murdered by their Bolshevik gaolers at Ekaterinburg,

in the Urals. M. Lenin's paymaster and ally, the German Emperor, does not seem to have made an effort to rescue the unhappy German Princess and her innocent children from their fate. The Empress Alexandra was, like Queen Marie Antoinette, a strong-willed woman, reared in a bad school, whose political advice brought her husband and family to ruin. But the Empress had long ceased to play any part in politics. In lamenting her fate, we think only of the human tragedy—of the poor woman, cast down from her high estate, robbed of her husband and of her young son, shut up with her young daughters in a prison, probably half-starved for weeks, and subjected to the grossest indignities by brutal gaolers before the end came. It is a pitiful story which the world will never forget.