The Waikato Times, THAMES VALLEY GAZETTE, AND KAWHIA ADVOCATE. Established Thirty-Four Years, THE OLDEST DAILY NEWSPAPER IN THE WAIKATO. THE LARGEST CIRCULATION OF ANY DAILY PAPER SOUTH OF AUCKLAND. WEDNESDAY, JULY 25, 1906. THE RUSSIAN CRISIS.

Waikato Times, Volume LVII, Issue 7066, 25 July 1906, Page 2

The Waikato Times, THAMES VALLEY GAZETTE, AND KAWHIA ADVOCATE. Established Thirty-Four Years, THE OLDEST DAILY NEWSPAPER IN THE WAIKATO. THE LARGEST CIRCULATION OF ANY DAILY PAPER SOUTH OF AUCKLAND. WEDNESDAY, JULY 25, 1906. THE RUSSIAN CRISIS.

DuillXG the short and troubled lite of Russia's first Parliament, there have been two chief subjects of dispute between the Duma aud the Czar, and each is deeply concerned with the ukase of dissolution. The monarch and the assembly have been at variance on the constitutional question and on the land question. The former has concerned the powers of the Duma and the status of the Cabinet. It has become evident that, when the Czar was forced to authorise the Duma, he clung to the idea that it would be ■merely a place where discontented men could relieve their minds by talking. The representatives of the people, on the other hand, held that they had come to St. Petersburg to legislate. They had no idea of confirming their functions in that direction to a grateful acquiescence in whatever the Czar, through his Ministers, might propose. Besides, they urged that those Ministers, instead of being responsible, as they were, solely to the Czar, should be responsible to the Parliament. This, no less than the specific acts of the Cabinet, provoked those cries of " Resign ! " which, time after time drowned their utterances in the Duma. On the land question, or the agrarian question, as the correspondents usually call it, the proposals of the Ministry and of the Duma, however their ultimate aims might diverge, differed mainly in extent. In to provide ''laud for the people," the Government proposed to form a reserve of ten million acres, but such was the outcry against the inadequacy of the proposal, that the promise soon grew to fifty million acres. The Duma still insisted on more, and apparently not without reason, since a well informed English journal stated that 180 million acres were required to satisfy the immediate needs of the peasantry. Extremists in the Duma met the situation with such words as those of M. Aladyin, speaking for the Labour party : —" It is no use waiting. We must appeal to the people and ask its support before the revolution breaks out. Then, when the Russian people has seized all the lands and overthrown all obstacles, the next Duma, like the French Assembly in the 18th century, will seek to give the accomplished fact legal form." This however, was not the altitude of the majority. Several Constitutional [)emocrats left the Chamber as a protest against M. Aladyin's conduct, and the Duma, from first to last, not seduced by any cry for confiscation, held fast by the policy of expropriation, or, as we should say compulsory purchase. The manifesto which the Duma has issued to the people of Russia, as cabled to-day, is mainly an appeal for support on these two great questions of the coustitutiou and the land. Though the latest news, or absence of news, seems to iuuic&to an interval of comparative quiet, events will surely show, iviid that speedily, that the appeal of the representatives from their false master to their true ones, has not been made in vain. ;