The N. Z. Times (PUBLISHED DAILY). MONDAY, OCTOBER 30, 1905. THE REVOLUTION IN RUSSIA.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXVII, Issue 5732, 30 October 1905, Page 4

The N. Z. Times

(PUBLISHED DAILY). MONDAY, OCTOBER 30, 1905. THE REVOLUTION IN RUSSIA.

WITH WHICH IS INCORPORATE D THE “ WELLINGTON INDEPENDENT.” ESTABLISHED 1815.

'The Czar starts for Denmark if necessary : steam is kept np on the Imperial yacht and its attendant warships.” From this curt cable-message the world may see the gravity of the events now crowding thick and fast throughout the vast extent of terrorised, inarticulate, enslaved, maddened Russia. The people are fraternising, combining, rising in their last desperate revolt. The iii’cbrand has boon applied; civil war begins. This is no “colonial war” that may be concluded by a diplomatic peace. A nation is in arms against an autocracy; and the Imperial rat waits ready to leave the sinking ship. In Warsaw every agitator caught

armed is to be instantly shot. In Lodz the Governor has ordered all his officials

to act without mercy. In Moscow the posted troops will lire with ball cartridge upon the smallest gathering of citizens or at “the slightest sign of criminal intent.' 1 Such aro the futile means —already tried, already found wanting—by which the emissaries of the llussian autocracy hope to dam this swiftly rising tide of a desperate people's rage. And while his officers do their bloody work in defence of their autocrat, Nicholas the Second of Russia waits trembling on his Imperial yacht with steam up. ready to save his Imperial skin by slinking ignobly off to the sanctuary of Denmark! This poor representative of autocracy, who so triumphantly crowned himself hut a decade ago—a sickly youth of arrested development and morbid will—has not even the desperate courage to stand in defence of his sacred rights. He has hoard of Charles of England, of Louis of France 1 The autocracy of Russia is in its death-throes; but the autocrat —if steam does not fail him—will save his anointed head. And what is the answer of the people to the “ball cartridge,” the instant shooting of every person bearing arms, the exhortation to act without mercy? We know what “a whiff of grape-shot” did for France. The suspension of traffic upon the Russian section of the Finnish railway is one answer ; the general strike of the employees of the Central Asian railway is another—from Finland to Siberia the flame has swiftly leapt; the open derision of St. Peters-burg—-where there aro now no newspapers, no gas, no electricity, no trains —of Trepoff’s “ball cartridge” injunction is the third answer; and the fourth, grim, portentous, big with events, is tho report of tho London “Times” St. Petersburg correspondent that the revolutionaries intended to resort to arms on Saturday. At any moment, now, we may hear the rattle of tho machine-guns, the shrieks of tho slaughtered people; at any moment wo may learn of the building of barricades, of all the hellish forces of civil war let loose over onesixth, of the terrestrial globe. Another world-drama has begun; tho curtain is rung up on the death-dirge of a system and an epoch. The autocracy had many ways to go; it has chosen tho way of civil war.