or war in the whole world besides. To argue against such a fixed idea is part of the business of medical psychologists. To render it permanently harmless is the duty of those who are liable to suffer from it and they are the entire Russian people. Its victims are lying in the fields of Manchuria and on the heights of the Liao-tung peninsula.

We have seen how that fixed idea of the autocrat undermined the world's peace. Upon everything that our people is, has, and would be, its influence has been still more pernicious. In particular it has destroyed all notion of legality, without which no ordered community can exist. A code of laws, civil and penal, we do possess, and it is spread over a vast number of folios. But its value is chiefly historical. Hence, Prince Dolgorouki truly wrote: "La plus volumineuse des mauvaises plaisanteries est notre code des lois." And in verity it comes to us like the sneer of some satanic autocrat, embodied in the phraseology of the courts. It is pretty well known to most people that everything is forbidden to us, which is not expressly allowed, but what foreigners have more difficulty in realizing is that nothing which is even expressly permitted can be done with the certainty that it will not entail severe punishment.

"Nobody shall be deprived of the rights of his social standing nor shall such rights be curtailed otherwise than by a tribunal for a crime." That is one of the many clauses of a law which foreigners might be tempted to take for the preamble to our Magna Charta. But during the present reign and the last they have one and all been rendered obsolete: for the members of the administration and even the police have been invested with extensive privileges which abolish most of the elementary rights of the individual. Hence noblemen, landowners, doctors, VOL. XXVI.

LIVING AGE.

1390

lawyers, schoolmasters, journalists, students, peasants, merchants in a word, members of all sections of society, have been arrested, imprisoned, banished, without ever being reproached with any misdemeanor. Yet the law has never been repealed. It is only systematically violated by the rulers in the name and on behalf of the autocracy. And now loud voices cry out that if autocracy cannot thrive without that privilege of breaking the law in order to trample on the people then autocracy must go.

The press is treated in a similar way. Its liberty is circumscribed by rules which are voluminous and stringent. Yet the journalist who exercises the slender liberty which they leave him is in constant danger of punishment and may be reduced to beggary, imprisoned, or driven to Siberia. In the provinces a newspaper has to be read and approved of by the censor before it can be printed. But even after this official has expressly allowed an article to appear the author of it may be dealt with as a criminal. And religious convictions are played with in like manner. A man holds, for instance, that our Russian Orthodoxy is Christ's Church, but that it ought to be governed by a patriarch instead of a Synod, he is kidnapped by the police, hurried off to a sort of oubliette, and there treated as a dangerous madman. Other people believe that Evangelical Christianity is Christ's teaching. For this they are outraged, banished, and their children excluded from Government and Zemsky schools. That is being done at this very moment, after the publication of the Imperial ukase. In Moscow young men who never broke a law are kept in prison for months and years without a trial, until at last they agree to starve themselves to death; and on the eleventh or twelfth day they are set free, there being no charge against them.

Spies are employed by the thousand to prey into men's secret thoughts about the autocracy. Letters are opened in the postoffice and read-and deplorable mistakes are sometimes made by the readers or their employers. All books, journals, and newspapers coming into the Empire have to be conned, and many of them mutilated by officials immeasurably less enlightened than the men whose reading they regulate. Education is systematically discouraged among the people; individuals who spread it as volunteers are arrested and punished as traitors. The Tsar himself in his marginal glosses discounts it emphatically. Let there be darkness is his command. Taxes are levied upon the peasants greater than they can bear, so that most of them feel the pinch of poverty and nearly all live in squalor, while the Grand Ducal Over-Russians appropriate the funds destined for the army, navy, and other public departments, and parade in the theatres or at balls with their favorite ladies.

Now this is a system of rank injustice which would disgrace the Middle Ages. It is opposed to the teaching of the Church, of which our Tsar is the chief protector. It is inhuman in its tendencies, selfish in its aims, barbarous in its methods. And it is eminently harmful to the autocracy itself.

It was intense hatred of that iniquitous system which emboldened the Zemstvo chiefs to meet together last November and to ask for representative government. It was loathing for that tissue of falsehood, corruption, hypocrisy, and cruelty that roused the students of our Universities and high schools, the members of the liberal professions-in a word, all thinking Russia-to cry "Down with the Autocracy!" And speaking for myself and for those whose views are the same as mine, I cannot but respect their motives. The people like the monarch were act

ing in good faith. At length on the 12-25 December the Emperor spoke out.

Will his ukase satisfy our people? Britons, Americans, Frenchmen, and Germans ask the question-needlessly. Ukases and manifestoes are paper which endureth all things. Ink and paper are among the plagues of our country. Remove the evils that press upon us, lighten the burdens that weigh us down, and our people will be satisfied and grateful. It is not paper, nor parchment, nor ukases, nor rescripts that we ask for, justice is all that we crave. And justice is denied by the ruler who himself demands generosity. Hitherto our people have been hardly dealt with, ground down as harmful enemies, not treated as loyal subjects. And now it is not that they will not, but that they cannot, endure any longer and live. They have but the choice of perishing in silence or of striking back in virtue of the law of self-defence. And the latter alternative commends itself to many.

It is not hard to help them, but the act presupposes moral courage and political insight, either in the Emperor himself or in his factotum, if he had one. And M. Witte's ukase gives proof of neither. It is a show got up for the delusion of a whole people on the lines on which shows are sometimes arranged for our Russian monarchs. The sham Crimean "villages" improvised by Potemkin for the Empress Catherine are the favorite type, and Witte's ukase is a magna charta for the million à la Potemkin, a dissolving view which will, I fear, do as little good to its authors as to its dupes. And the circumstances that the keepers of the peasants' souls and consciences, the land-chiefs, are not to be disbanded, suggests that, after all, even political rights may be but a mirage.

Speaking plainly, the ukase together with its supplementary communiqué reads like a cruel and stupid joke. We

look in vain there for any one measure which promises to be fair, square, and thorough. They are nearly all qualified -I might truly say nullified-by ifs and ans. For that reason they tantalize and irritate instead of pacifying.

When the Tsar, yielding to the entreaties of the Dowager Empress, lately put the interests of the HolsteinGotthorp dynasty in the hands of M. Witte political sagacity as well as common sense ought to have prompted him to lay down the condition that no ukase should be issued by way of answer to the demands of the Zemsky Congress. That was a matter of personal dignity and political prudence. An autocrat whose title-deeds were drawn up in heaven cannot afford to allow the mere masses to encroach upon his privileges. Above all things there must be no weakness, no blenching, no signs of fear. That is part of the A B C of autocracy, and nobody ever learned the lesson better than Nicholas I. But his descendant Nicholas II. has committed the unpardonable sin in an absolute monarch; he has allowed himself to be overmastered by the multitude; they piped and he actually danced. An obscure criminal took the life of his Grand Vizier, and the mighty ruler, answerable only to God, at once changed the whole course of his Government in consequence. For a generation our best men had striven to influence the autocracy. Men of letters, journalists, politicians, even courtiers and ministers had tried their hands and failed. Nicholas had but to stamp his foot or hurl his ukase and not a head was seen any longer to tower above the low level of the masses. Silence reigned and resignation. But an obscure mur

At present Russia is governed not by the Romanoff but by the Holstein-Gotthorp dynasty. Elizabeth I. was the last of the Romanoffs and her nephew Peter III, the first of the Holstein-Gotthorps.

derer, eschewing arguments, makes a bomb and takes the life of the Imperial minister and the Tsar is immediately cowed. He heartily disavows the lifework of his counsellor and his own, and promises to do better and differently in future; forgetting that he is also abandoning the principle of autocracy, proclaiming the futility of argument and putting a premium on criminal violence.

Punishment followed the blunder with swift and sure foot. People thirsting for change noted for future use the spring which moves the sovereign. At banquets and assemblies they laid down the dangerous principle that killing is not necessarily murder and warmly eulogized the assassins of Plehve. And that, to my thinking, is a calamity not for the dynasty only but likewise for our much suffering people. Repeal, reform, abolish to your heart's content, but let not your action be or even seem to be the consequence of fear! But the wine is poured out and now we must drink it to the very dregs.

If it was a blunder to promise reforms because bombs can be manufactured and thrown by fellows who fearing nothing can dare everything, it was a crime to bungle the matter so hopelessly as has been done in the ukase of last December. If reform was worth undertaking at all-at such

a

terrible sacrifice-it was surely worth doing well. But the document penned by an ambitious official in a hurry to snatch the reins of power, and clawed and mutilated by Grand Ducal harpies bent on upholding their prerogative to prey upon the people, ought never to have seen the light of day. Not because of its gaps, which are many, but on account of its sham reforms, which constitute a wanton provocation. I do not complain that there is no mention there of the legislative assembly which was decreed in

clause 3 of the original ukase and struck out at the last moment. At best it inaugurated only a ceremony, and at worst-i.e., when the Grand Dukes Vladimir and Sergius had done with it-its proper place was the opera bouffe. I do not complain that the whole question of education, which our autocracy is more anxious to stifle than to spread, has been burked. That is far better than bungling it. In truth every problem ought to have been thus avoided which the Tsar could not or would not deal with fully and thoroughly.

Liberty of conscience is one of the "liberties" which, like the right of public meeting and of association, his Majesty ought to have fought shy of to the last, for he has manifestly no intention of granting it. The StundistsEnglishmen would perhaps call them Evangelical Christians-are persecuted in the most unchristian and sometimes inhuman way; and in this the ukase has made no change. Since it was issued our ministry of Public Instruction -as appropriately presided over by a general as the land forces in Manchuria were commanded by a "horse marine"-has refused to the children of Stundists admission to any Government or Zemsky schools. They are condemned to live and die in crass ignorance, not by our Orthodox Church, still less by our tolerant people, but by the autocracy. And now men say that if the night of ignorance must be preserved in order that the star of autocracy should continue to twinkle, they will dispense with its light altogether. Eight Evangelical Christians have been ordered to quit the town of Sevastopol, and several more have been expelled from the province of Kieff since the publication of the ukase. Words, then, not deeds, ukases not reforms, are the watchwords. The manifesto of March 1903 dealt with liberty of conscience in terms similar to those

of the ukase of last December. Nobody was a whit the better for it, for persecution went on as before. Would it not have been wiser to continue the old system in silence without intensifying its bitterness by arousing hopes and disappointing them? Liberty of conscience, forsooth!

The press is another skeleton in the cupboard of autocracy, and officialdom is resolved to hinder as long as possible any political Ezekiel from causing breath to enter into its dry bones. Perchance its revelations would render the existence of the bureaucracy unbearable. That fear is not groundless. But if the press skeleton is not to be removed from the cupboard, and revived, why disturb it with such solemnity? The Tsar promises to repealthe press laws? No, not the press laws; that is impossible. Perhaps the ministerial circulars and the orders daily telephoned to editors which are. so to say, the barbed-wire entanglements around the Statute Law? No, not even these. His Majesty will remove only those restrictions which his bureaucrats may consider "super. fluous." Superfluous restrictions! And for this joke a special clause of the Imperial ukase was necessary!

But the Emperor is misinformed if he fancies it is still possible to deal thus with the people's means of enlightenment-education and the press. I who sincerely desire to see the autocracy live, and thrive, believe that it would be inadvisable, if it were feasible, to continue to gag the newspaper and book press. But it is now no longer feasible. Since the Tsar, intimidated by the bomb of Sozonoffs appointed Sviatopolk Mirzky to the Ministry of the Interior and allowed the press for a few weeks a greater degree of liberty than it has enjoyed for a whole generation, he dropped the reins and it is

The man who actually threw the bomb which killed Plehve.

very unlikely that he can seize them again. I confess I am not sorry. The muzzling system gave us dead silence for a time, followed by cold-blooded lying for a season, and then disaster after disaster. Our people are nourished on mystery and falsehood which are becoming part of their very soul tissues. On the day that Port Arthur surrendered our official organs assured the people that the Japanese had suffered such tremendous defeats that they had completely lost heart. And then the terrible blow smote our people unparried. In a word, it is certain that no power should, and it seems probable that no power can, muzzle our press in the future as in the past. And it is devoutly to be hoped that officialdom will not put the matter to the test. Time is a swift horse and woe to the autocrat who clings not to the mane.

A grain of humor in the Tsar might have saved the Tsardom. But his character lacks that grain. While allowing bureaucrats to hide the truth under a bushel at their discretion, to force our masses to think and pray according to official circulars, to arrest men of every class and rank and punish them without trial or accusation," the ukase naïvely announces his Majesty's intention to set law above administrative caprice. "For law," he seriously adds, "is the most essential mainstay of the throne in an autocratic State." "God forbid!" is the response which the friends of autocracy will fervently utter. If law be in truth the strongest support of the throne, the outlook of absolutism in Russia is bleak indeed. For law has long been no more than a vague tradition among us.

Some months ago I was in hopes that autocracy might acquire a further

That is the signification of the provisional preventive measures adopted after the murder of Alexander III. and down to this day. They abolish all laws and make the governors

lease of existence without ruining Russia or ceasing to be itself. But by autocracy I meant not the oriental despotism of Alexander III. and Nicholas II., in which thousands of officials share, but the one-man rule of the first Romanoffs, which was absolute without being despotic. But the despotism of the Holstein-Gotthorp dynasty is a monster with thousands of hands, all grasping and all throttling. And of this chaotic régime we shall soon see the last.

Some years ago, I remember, M. Pobedonostseff-the last ideologist of autocracy-explained the limitations of that form of government at a sitting of the Committee of Ministers. Sipyaghin, who afterwards became Home Secretary and was murdered, had presented to the Emperor the petition of a private person who desired to have a decision of the Senate summarily quashed. No precedent could be pleaded for interfering in a civil case which had been definitely decided by the highest court, but Sipyaghin held that the Tsar could do everything, and that whatever he does is right and just. Pobedonostseff, however, flatly denied that theory, and in an excellent speech very clearly explained what the limitations of autocracy are. He defined it as a legal form of government not a despotism. The Tsar, he said, is indeed the source of law, but on condition that he be also its guardian and see that it is respected.' That, unfortunately, is only the theory.

Still, I hoped that Nicholas II. would see that the Tsardom need not be the embodiment of caprice, that one man may be absolute without all good and gifted men being banished or imprisoned. I thought that with competent advisers-chosen by himself-to

sharers of Imperial power. And the Tsar in his ukase has refused to repeal them.

7 Sipyaghin's proposal was thrown out by the Committee of Ministers.