Unexceptionable, this, to the higher powers, save that in the preamble in the original draft, the Czar’s historic title of “Autocrat” had not been given him. A debate followed, and brought about the declarations which defined the parties of the third Duma. Bishop Mitrophane, of the Right, or reactionary party, rose. He said in the name of his group that the Address to the Throne must contain the phrase “Autocrat of all the Russias.” Lawyer Plevako seconded, threatening to secede if the proper title were not incorporated. Paul Milyoukov spoke hotly for the opposing Cadets, asking whether the country was or was not under a constitution. He declared the new election law to be contrary to the original ukase and an act of force. Others of the Left, among them orator Maklakov of the Cadets, declaimed against the election law by which this Duma was constituted. They were not politic, these spokesmen, but harsh and dogmatic, yielding none of the courtier-respect that makes up for so much absence of real yielding. For the Octobrists, Alexander Goutchkov led the debate. His speech revealed that they operated, not with the bludgeon, but with the Damascus blade. They were of flexible obstinacy and opportunism, stirring up no sleeping dogs, bending to rise again. Goutchkov slipped adroitly into his speech the disputed word constitution, thus: “We do not believe that the Czar’s power has been diminished. The Emperor has become free, for the Constitution has delivered him from court camarillas and the hierarchy of chinovniks.” Thanks largely to his tact, the Octo brists won. The Address, without “Autocrat,” was passed by a vote of two to one. But it passed at the cost of self-separation by the right wing of the reactionaries, who withdrew.

The answer of the Administration came sharply from Prime Minister Stolypin:—

He called upon the Chamber to incorporate the recognition of the “Autocracy.”

A hundred members protested. Many of the Cadets walked out. To the Octobrists, barely a quorum, fell the humiliating duty of recalling their own address and of inserting, despite the scorn, the fateful word. So shaken was the group itself by the conflict that of its one hundred and sixty members but ninety-five united in the caucus that elected officers and committee members. Alexander Goutchkov was chosen chairman, Baron Meyendorf, Priest Bjeloussov, and Radsjauko, officers. Among the heads of committees were Prince Wollanski, and Peasant Kusovkov. In spite of the stigma of reaction popularly imposed upon them, these were not unrepresentative men.

The distracted Duma got slowly under way, and the Prime Minister brought before them his proposed policy of administration.

M. Stolypin’s address to the Duma, November 16, 1907, stated that:—

Business got centred on these practical subjects. Discussions as to whether or not there was an autocracy gave place to famine-relief measures and railway-rate studies. The absenting delegates of the Left and Right, who had retreated to their tents in the wrangle over the Czar’s titles, and had left the forlorn little band of constructive Octobrists to carry on the work of legislation, now returned. The proceedings began to take parliamentary form.

The Budget came on, the Ministers of the Government presenting their projects for discussion. In the heat of debate, the Minister of Finance, M. Kakovtsev, exclaimed, “Thank God, we have no parliament yet!” The fact that an Imperial Minister was presenting his budget to an elected assembly showed the reality, but the war on names rose up afresh. The Duma officially declared the Minister’s expression unfortunate. He threatened to resign unless the house apologized. The Left again exploded in outcries, called out that the Duma was a farce, threw in their votes as more fuel for the flame of discord, and deserted the hall when they were in the minority. Still the little band of moderates chose the self-abnegating, unspectacular part, and gave the apology that avoided a crisis.

But now came up a matter wherein the dispute was not over a name or a title, but a reality. The Government, upheld by the Czar, the Court, and much public sympathy, proposed a programme for a new navy. It called for the immediate allocation of one hundred and eleven million roubles, and the expenditure in ten years, of over a billion roubles. In the state of the country this entailed a fearful burden, perhaps the loss of the gold standard. The outwardly supine members, in rows like grenadiers, voted against the project. By 194 to 78 it was lost.

The Minister of Finance shortly afterwards undertook to issue railway bonds without the Duma’s consent. With a rebuke, for which this time no apology was asked or given, his estimate was cut down by one rouble, and voted. The Amur Railway was authorized, though three hundred million roubles are its prospective toll. The sole remaining Pacific port of Russia, Vladivostok, is thereby linked with the Irkutsk and Trans-Baikal districts of Siberia, and so doubly insured against an eastern enemy.

After a lengthy session the third Duma adjourned, but not by violence. It could show as results two hundred bills passed, a budget thoroughly scrutinized and ratified, and much faithful work in committee. More important still, the Parliament, by forbearance and patience, had made itself a part of the machinery of government, and had shown that a national legislature did not mean expropriation, and a partitioned Russia.

At the end, fiery Maklakov of the Cadets, he who early in the session had cried out that all was a farce, admitted that “the third Duma has lost none of its rights, it is systematically extending them.” All honor to those whose self-suppression and patience won.

The thin edge of the wedge had been driven in under absolutism by the third Duma, but little could one foresee that a half-dozen quiet blows would, during the fourth Duma’s session, bring autocracy to the greatest crisis it has encountered since it decreed a legislature. The heart of the situation lies in a naval bill submitting to the Duma matters which the Constitution reserves to the control of the Emperor. Strangely, too, the Czar is himself the abettor, if not the originator, of the supplanting.

In May, 1906, the Czar decided to create the “Naval General Staff.” One hundred thousand roubles a year were needed, and the money must be sought of the Duma. The first two assemblies being so violent, the measure lay in abeyance, to the great injury of the service. Since the regeneration of the navy was one of the measures made painfully necessary by the Japanese War, M. Stolypin had a bill drafted, in three clauses: one ratifying the creation of the “Naval General Staff,” a second furnishing an annual sum for its operation, a third supplying a fund for contingencies. No feature of the creation, save the financial aspect, came at all within the legal jurisdiction of the Duma. Yet the Premier had the organization itself brought before the Assembly.

The deputies criticised the institution, modified it, sliced the estimates. Assuming the judicial functions of a court of last appeal, they voted the money and passed the bill, which M. Stolypin then submitted to the upper chamber. In view of the overstepping of domain, the bill was, after a lucid exposition of the law by the ex-Controller-General, thrown out.

The matter was next submitted to the Czar himself, who authorized its reintroduction in the Duma. A second time the measure was passed and sent to the Council. M. Durnovo, ex-Minister, ablest of the Conservatives, and candidate for the Premiership, made a notable speech. He proved clearly the trespass upon the rights reserved to the Crown, showed that such precedents would build up an artificial claim which could not later be combated, while the allowance of participation in one instance gave a warrant for demanding interference in any and every proposal. The bill was a blow at the very heart of monarchical government, and a degree of democracy not allowed even in republican France. But, defiantly, M. Stolypin held his ground. The anomaly was presented of Conservatives decrying the Premier for undermining the dynasty, with the Emperor himself supporting the culprit. Thus has the former government minority been converted into a majority,—the measure passed by the small margin of twelve.

The reactionaries have bitter feud with this Premier. He has, it is allowed, so enlarged the functions of the deputies by handing over to them, one after another, the vital prerogatives of the autocracy, that no later action can ever disestablish the Duma. The Empire is now governed through a unified cabinet; the important prerogative of appointing the governors-general has been exercised by the Premier, rather than by the Czar, since June 16, 1906. Russia has marched far on its upward way.

Great, however, is the task ahead. Of all that the Duma can achieve the country has supreme need. The agrarian question calls aloud for solution, and the peasants’ future depends on land-relief. The Emperor has given instructions for the sale of most of the Crown domains and those of the Imperial Family. The nobles are being encouraged to sell to the tenants, on notes guaranteed by the Imperial land bank. Firm and able hands must guide this improvement, promoting the division of estates left to run wild, but avoiding the pitfalls of threatened property-rights.

Individual enterprise must be awakened, which will in the end bring about more scientific rotation and intensive farming. The old system leaves fallow thirty-three per cent of the arable land—an area equal to the whole ploughed acreage of the United States. In western Europe but seven per cent is fallow, and the value of the harvest per acre in Russia is less than a third that of Germany. The policy adopted in the Agrarian Law of November 9, 1906, for the gradual breaking-up of the communistic Mirs, and the division of the common lands, at the villagers’ option, into freehold plots, is a wise one. In 1907, the year following the law’s promulgation, 2617 peasants, in the government of Ekaterinoslav had become individual proprietors. Under the Land Act of 1909 one million farms had been taken up for private ownership in the first six months of the law’s operation.

Emigration to the vast untilled fields of Siberia should be carried on with all the efficiency of which the Government is capable. That this is in progress, the figure of four hundred and ninety-one thousand emigrants for the first seven months of 1908 attests. Fifty-nine thousand homeseekers were sent by villages which wished to emigrate thither en masse. But care and providence must follow the movement, and insure that the settlers are equipped with the means for safe and permanent establishment.

The race-question calls also for a righteous solution. The future must bring the repeal of the old bureaucratic laws of Jewish exclusion, and end the vicious circle of oppression and terrorism against this much wronged people. The chaotic finances of the Empire must be regulated by years of patient work, such as that of the last Duma, through whose agency there is now, for the first time in twenty-two years, a budget surplus.

The Duma members, to whom these all-important tasks fall, must plough the fields in all their armor. The autocracy is not their greatest enemy. The history of parliamentary government demonstrates again and again that in an ordered community authority gradually reverts to the national representative assembly. Little by little power slips away from the throne. In England, in 1686, the reign of James II could show Jeffreys’ Bloody Assizes; yet five years later the Parliament was in full and permanent control of the government.

The preservation of the country from the nether chaos is, however, a mightier problem. Before the ship of state rides safe in the harbor of true representative government there must come a critical period when the administrative powers are not firmly clasped by the hand of either autocracy or duma. This hiatus-time, when iron repression ceases and sober self-rule begins, is yet to come. Those who must tide the nation over it are such as those pathetically few Octobrists, unpopular because of their bending, craven-seeming policy, and because of the unfree elections that gave them place. Will such a group, when the crucial hour strikes, be allowed peaceably to pilot the vessel? Or will red-handed revolution wrench from their grip the tiller, bereft of the guidance of autocracy? Is it to be evolution or revolution?

One cannot deny that a free election to-day would throw out the toiling Octobrists and put in a membership like that of the first Duma. These constructive, unvisionary men are not loved, nor is their progress likely to make them so. They exist as the ruling factor only by virtue of election manipulations and legal interpretations. With this essentially temporary support taken away, the group would be powerless, for every indication shows that the people would not support them or their policies.

Even Moscow, their former stronghold, fell away in the 1909 elections. There is throughout the country an undercurrent of fierce demand for an immediate millennium, with Liberty as the guiding grace and some particular party as its escort. A song that has become almost an anthem, “Spurn with us that ancient tyrant,” chanted softly by the school-boys to the tune of the Marseillaise,—this tells the tale of what is in the air, and in the blood of the people. The most poorly-suppressed desire is insatiate to hack away with one blow the abuses that have, through the centuries, rooted themselves deep in Russian society. The experience of the various revolutionary and terrorist movements proves that their votaries are capable of daring any death for their creeds, and of swimming to their imaged goal in a sea of blood. Let the conservative Octobrist group once succeed in concentrating power in the Duma, and then let a free election substitute for them such men as were in the first Duma, and the Russian Revolution has become a fact.

It is a commonplace to compare the situation with that of France in 1790. There is, however, one fundamental difference. France possessed a numerous and economically powerful bourgeoisie, from whom political rights had been withheld. This class included many strong men moved to a unity of political desire. They were able in the first place to work up into a place of dominance. After the interval of supplanting terrorism, they retook by their own efforts the power which, save for the periods of despotic militarism, they have since maintained. In Russia the conservative middle-class is numerically very weak, and its representatives are unable to seize and hold control themselves. They possess it now only precariously, by the external propping of weakening absolutism. Will Russia’s Octobrists, after performing the function of filching power from the autocracy, meet, at the hands of a new Robespierre, the fate of the high-idealed Gironde?

One cannot yet answer. But whatever the harvest, the work of the third and fourth Dumas, carried out in harmony with the Imperial Ministers, has shown that the last dread arbitrament of social war need not come. Revolution is the final recourse, to be undertaken only if a political and social situation is so desperate that all other means must fail. Such is not the case in Russia. There are administrative abuses there. But governmental restrictions press rather less than one might imagine upon the plain workaday people; and compared to those of other nations, they are not exceptional save in degree. It is the educated and so-called upper classes who complain. Taxes elsewhere than in Russia are burdensome and sure as death. Emigration to Siberia will give any peasant the legal privilege of escaping taxation, which in America is the prerogative of her absentee plutocracy alone. The exile system, dwindling for years past, has now been in effect abolished by the refusal of the Duma to make an appropriation for its continuance. The press-censorship is only the open operation of influences tacitly accepted elsewhere—such as in the United States left the Tweed Ring so long uncriticised. The much-condemned passport is actually of no more inconvenience than showing a railway ticket, and it does not come within “forty sagenes” of the custom-house inquisition which faces every American citizen on his return home.

It is not an error to say that in many matters of individual liberty the Slav enjoys more than the American. In the treatment of subject nations, reliable and neutral witnesses declare that Russia does not approach the rigor of the Prussian bureaucracy in Alsace. Many of the Empire’s restrictions are those which obtained throughout Europe fifty years ago—abuses common to a certain stage of civilization, and of public opinion. These melt away in newer customs, for time is curing much. Once the chariot of progress is started, many evils right themselves in the natural and inevitable upward pressure, and many slough off unnoted. It is not so many years back that in America a black man could be deported to malarial lowlands more deadly than Siberia’s steppes; not so long ago that the English Parliament passed an act requiring all railway-trains to be preceded by a man carrying a red flag. Like the seignorial rights of Germany’s feudal states, anachronisms become outgrown, and fall away.

In Russia, unfortunately, the onslaught against iniquitous human laws is overcarried into a blind charge against Nature’s laws, which no revolution can repeal. The protest against dire artificial abuses is mixed with a rebellion against the curse of Adam. It is the fearful fact of life that the destiny of the majority is anxiety, dependence for daily bread on other men, grinding incessant toil remunerated by a bare livelihood, a barring-back from the fullest personal capacity and possibilities through poverty, parentage, environment, and lack of opportunity. The forces of Nature and primal competition put so many limitations upon every one’s action that it is hard to say which are due to the tyranny of men, which are the handicaps born of the nature of things. The cry for deliverance is rising equally in the workhouses of Scotland, in France, where thirty-five per cent of the land is owned by great proprietors, in the slums of New York City, and in the rice-fields of Japan. A government under the present system can but do its best to develop men’s capacities, and to give them a fair deal. All that the best of modern societies has succeeded yet in securing to the mass of mankind is the chance to get their sons the education which will enable them to vanquish some of the limitations, security for the person, and protection from robbery of the cruder sort.

Capacity and opportunity can come but by slow degrees. When one sees the numbers and the types in the villages, men of latent capacities undoubtedly, but swamped by the spirit of nietchevo and with all their enterprise sapped in the stagnant communism of the Mir, he realizes the futility of a sudden change and the hopelessness of germinating by political pellet the leaven of progress in the hundred and forty millions.

Rulers may be changed by revolution. But the real quickening of the people to their great future must come and is coming by the slow, sure way of evolution.