THE TSAR. '

Evening Post, Volume LXVIII, Issue 80, 1 October 1904, Page 13

THE TSAR. '

Prince Kropotkin in the Speaker combats the notion prevalent in England that the Tsar means well' but that- his bureaucracy prevents him from knowing the real condition of affairs and from doing any'gocd. The Quarterly article, he thinks, will enable the legend to be appreciated at its just value. He says: "Writing some seven years ago in an American magazine, I indicated that no Emperor of Russia had begun his reign under more favourable circumstances than Nicholas 11., and none had so rapidly destroyed the nopes with which he baa been received. He was very young when he became Emperor, and on account of his very youth he was sympathised with. . . . . Profound peace reigned hi Russia, and in the world at large, and the slightest hint that he would have dropped, to intimate his intention of inaugurating a reign of reconciliation, and of making concessions to the enlightened portion of Russian society, would have at once rendered him most popular." There are, Kropotkin adds, such optimist moments in history. "But neither Nicholas 11. nor his advisers understood the significance of the moment." As to the statement about " a poor prisoner-Tsar who cannot get at the truth and is kept ha ignorance by his functionaries," it is, Kropotkin says, absurd on the face of it : "To say the truth, there is no country in Europa in which the real conditions of toe peasants and agriculture altogether, the bad conditions of the schools, the want of education, the abnormal conditions of the factory labourers, the drawbacks of Protection, the extent and organisation of the domestic trades, the organisation of justice in the country districts, the peasant Courts, the taxation, and so on, would have been better explored and more discussed in the reviews than they have beer in Russia. Immense house-to-house enquiries covering millions of households have been made for the Zemstvos, by specialists, with a zeal and an accuracy which are not often found in administrative statistics. More than 450 volumes of such researches have been pubfished, while their results have been eagerly analysed in hundreds of review articles." "Russia," we are assured, "knows her sores—she is only prevented from healing them."