The N. Z. Mail PUBLISHED WEEKLY. WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 25, 1905. RUSSIA'S PARLOUS STATE.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1717, 25 January 1905, Page 45

The N. Z. Mail PUBLISHED WEEKLY. WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 25, 1905. RUSSIA'S PARLOUS STATE.

Ever since tho outbreak of war there has been growing unrest among the industrial classes in Russia, Riots, strikes, and political demonstrations have been almost continuous. Tho artisan and the- peasant have become supple tools in the hands of tho revolutionary propagandist, and to-day are reaping the bloody harvest of the alliance. Aristocracy was not likely to yield to demands for representative institutions and the secret ballot without resort to the rifle and sabre. The Terror will probably lear ins head at Moscow and St. Petersburg before that day comes. Never was Russia so completely under the heel of the police, so thoroughly enmeshed m red-tape- as today ; never was tho bureaucratic spirit- so uu-lnistak-enly in control. The local assemblies which held within them the seed o-f a. new life have been brought to heal; even the village commune has its elective overseer: the jury system has been restricted to tho decision of tho most- unimportant cases, and everywhere have the liberties which budded after the reforms of Alexander 11. been ruthlessly clipped- But the internal problems of 'Russia are not to he settled m an hour or a day by mere coinstiiuuonal changes. The country is not intellect iaily prepared for them. In other countries tho power of the Crown has been gradually whittled away by peoples in whom national intellectual development had reached a stage which compelled automatically the concession of representative institutions. But the universities cf Germany, the middle clashes of England, the bourgeoisie of France have no counterpart in Russia. Nowhere is there homogeneity. There are a thousand elements of subdivision. Of creeds and sects there are (scores; the different and mutually unintelligible tongues are multitudinous; the caste distinctions are extreme. Russia, has no classes marked out for leadership capable of checking the passions behind them. The revolutionary movement of to-day is quite as anti-national in spirit as the autocracy; it would substitute communal for Imperial ideals. Like the Nihilist propaganda, it ‘‘expresses the very philosophy of disintegration.” Intellect and energy developed and organised to the fullest possible extent are the supreme assets of states. Had the Russian bureaucracy been able to grasp the significance of this maxim, and to have acted upon it during the last quarter of a- century, instead of repressing the thought and initiative of the peopie, the country would have been spared many of the pains of its present travail. It is the weight of taxation that is pressing the life out of the people. The vast extension of manufactures, the growth of State monopolies, the dislocation of agriculture, the steady pressure of indirect taxation are creating new and formidable problems. While it is very clear that the present movement is much more revolutionary than evolutionary! it may bo possible that tentative economical changes will bo made, lest more drastic ones be forced. But the Russian peoples are as yet no more fit for experiments such as have been made by [Western nations than are the

Soudanese. Were tho Czar to shake himself free from the intolerance ol religion, to remodel the atrocious financial system of his Empire, to institute enlightened personal rule for the mediaeval methods of the bureaucracy, and to spend as much on education as is now paid for repression, the Hand oi ; Anarchy night he stayed. The danger that now faces the- empire is that tho slumbering volcano of discon-

tent can be stirred to frightful upheaval by the sudden enfranchisement of Ignorance.