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THE LAST APPEAL OF THE RUSSIAN LIBERALS.

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fliction of punishment without previous trial, hundreds and perhaps thousands of persons annually are subjected to the severest punishment that can be inflicted upon an educated man; namely, banishment from home and friends, and that by a mere administrative order based upon nothing. Persons exiled in this way have no means of knowing how long their punishment will continue. They are deprived even of the consolation which every common criminal has in knowing definitely the length of time he is to suffer. Moreover, the friends of a political exile have no means of knowing the nature of the offense with which he is charged; often he himself does not know; but they both have a right to suppose that the accusation cannot be proved, since if it could be the accused would be duly indicted and tried by a court. At the time when the law relating to administrative exile was promulgated, it was explained as an unusual measure of clemency, intended to lighten the punishment of young and misguided offenders by substituting banishment to distant provinces for the much severer penalties which would be inflicted by the courts if the accused should be brought to formal trial. When, however, the Moscow Assembly of Nobles asked that every person sentenced to exile should be given the right to demand a judicial investigation of his case, no attention whatever was paid to its petition.

Third. There is in the present condition of the courts and of local self-government another cause of irritation, arising out of the grievously illogical and inconsistent policy of the Government itself. In the early part of the present reign the political ideal of the Russian people was approved not only by the highest authorities of the State, but by the supreme ruler of the empire. At the very first step, however, toward the realization of that ideal, the Administration manifested a lack of confidence in the forces of society. Immediately after the promulgation of such laws, for example, as the act providing for the organization of cantonal and provincial assemblies [Zemskoe Polozhenia and the act reforming the courts [Sudebni Ustavi], there began a series of withdrawals and restrictions. All the limitations of the powers of the provincial assemblies which have before been enumerated; the peculiar method of dealing with political offenses; the system of administrative exile; the denial in certain cases of the right of trial by jury, and the relegation of political offenses to specially organized courts, all these were in the nature of withdrawals or restrictions of rights and privileges once granted. These recisions began almost as soon as the new laws went into operation, and they were made in a delicately graded series, which can hardly

be regarded as accidental. Take, for example, the series of steps by which we have come, from the order of things established by the new court laws, to the present method of conducting political trials. In the beginning the courts acted independently, and had exclusive jurisdiction; then the officers of the Third Section were appointed assistants of the courts; then the balance of power was transferred from the courts to the Third Section; and finally, all authority and responsibility were concentrated in the hands of the gendarmes. These and other similar facts show what attitude the Government took toward reform. They compelled society to stand forth in defense of the institutions which it held dear, and thus in the very beginning created an abnormal situation. The Government and the people, instead of coöperating fraternally in the work of reform, took an attitude of hostility toward each other. For this the people are often blamed, and to a certain extent they are perhaps blameworthy; but those who condemn the people forget that in a country where the Government is all-powerful the Government should show most selfpossession.

Fourth. That which happened to representative institutions and to the courts happened also to the press, and perhaps even in a worse form. The law of 1865 gave to our press certain rights by abolishing in specified cases preliminary censorial supervision, and by giving to the courts jurisdiction of cases where the freedom of the press was abused; but that The existing law was soon made a dead letter by a whole series of restrictive measures. system of censorial supervision which rests upon administrative discretion has one capital defect, and that is its failure to furnish any rule definitely fixing beforehand the cases in which and the extent to which an offending publication shall be proscribed. Of this defect the censors themselves complain, since they sometimes receive at the same time one reprimand for allowing the publication of books and articles manifestly innocent and another for not allowing the publication of books and articles which are as manifestly mischievous. Society is irritated by still another injustice. It often happens that even the withdrawal of a question by censorial prohibition from the field of literary discussion does not prevent the writers on one side [the Government side] from setting forth their opinions and sharply attacking their adversaries, while the latter, silenced by the prohibition, cannot reply even to the extent of explaining more clearly their own position. An illustration of this is furnished by the question of classical instruction in our schools. Restrictions of the press and limitations of free speech in general might have some

raison d'être in a country where the governing power felt itself to be weak in comparison with the people; but it is well known that in Russia the power of the Government is enormous. Limitations of the right of free speech merely weaken that power. If the Government fears publicity, then it must have something to conceal from the people; -such is the inevitable conclusion to be drawn from the present condition of the press.

The need of free speech is never so deeply felt as in periods of discontent; and even apart from discontent, that need in Russian society is extremely urgent. The Russian people are passing through an important crisis in their history a crisis which is economic, social, and political. Nothing but the free interchange of ideas can lessen the difficulties and embarrassments of this transition period. When in dealing with such difficulties and embarrassments the Government adopts a course which society does not approve, the press is the only medium through which the consequent alarm and excitement can be tranquilized. By refusing to listen to frankly expressed opinions, the Government not only gives another proof of its want of confidence in its own power, but deprives itself of an important means of knowing with whom it has to deal. There may exist in the social organism needs and forces of which the Government is entirely ignorant and by which it is liable at any moment to be taken unawares. Of this the present state of things is a proof. The Administration up to this very hour has not been able to find out definitely who the enemies of social order are, and it is doubtful whether it even knows their working methods, because by withdrawing the light of publicity it has enshrouded such methods in an atmosphere of secrecy and obscurity. In the absence of free speech the enemies of the Government must remain unknown even to society itself. The unsatisfied demand of the people for freedom of speech is one of the chief sources of the existing discontent. Every educated man, by virtue of a law of his intellectual being, seeks to exchange ideas with others to convince or be convinced. Conflict is the natural state of an idea, and it cannot be suppressed without a suppression of thought itself. Limiting the freedom of discussion does not weaken the energy of thought, it intensifies and concentrates it; and if there is no opportunity for an intellectual conflict, there arises a conflict which is social and political.

IV.

THE discontent which pervades Russian society, and which is the result of the mistaken policy of the Government in dealing with in

ternal affairs, can be removed only by measures in which society shall take part. The Government cannot accomplish the desired result alone. A mere cursory glance at the state of the country is enough to convince one that it is time to call into action all Russia's healthy powers. The demands of the empire are constantly increasing. The imperial budget has more than doubled in the last twenty years, and would have been still larger than it is if the satisfaction of important imperial needs had not been postponed. The last war necessitated an extraordinary expenditure, a large part of which has not even yet been permanently covered. It is absolutely impossible for the country, under the present revenue system, to sustain even for a few years the enormous and constantly increasing burden of imperial taxation. Although new issues of paper money and the temporary stimulation of business which followed the war have enabled the Government during the past two years to strike a balance without a deficit, that favorable result cannot be counted upon in future, nor even in the current fiscal year. It is plain to every one, and was long ago admitted by the Government, that Russia's internal revenue system stands in need of a reform — not a reform confined to the working-over of certain old taxes and the invention of a few new ones, but a systematic and fundamental reform of our whole system, with capital changes in the distribution of the burdens of taxation among the several classes of the people. Even this is not enough. No possible reform in the revenue system will be of any avail unless there is an increase in the people's wealth and producing power. All persons who have had an opportunity to observe closely the domestic life of our provinces agree in declaring that the people are constantly growing poorer instead of richer. At this very moment a third of the empire is suffering from insufficient food, and in some places there is actual famine. In southern Russia the grain beetle threatens renewed desolation,* and in a whole series of provinces diphtheria and other epidemic diseases are raging unchecked.†

Our manufacturing industries, in the opinion of competent judges, are beginning to decline, and there is a prospect in the near future of another crisis. In foreign trade the competition of the United States closes to us every year more and more of our markets. Everywhere in all departments of economic life there is a morbid feeling of shaken confidence which saps the productive power of the coun

*The damage caused by the grain beetle in 1878 exceeded 15,000,000 roubles.-G. K.

Forty thousand persons had died of diphtheria in the two provinces of Kharkoff and Pultava.— G. K.

try. This feeling is not a mere transitory impression; it is a well-founded consciousness of the fact that our ruling mechanism does not answer to the mutability and the increasing complexity of a great empire's demands. Now, as in "the good old times," the central Government jealously excludes the people from participation in the national life and takes upon itself the difficult task of thinking and acting for them. This task was hard enough even when the life of the people went on in the long-established patriarchal way to which both society and the Government were accustomed, but that order of things has undergone in recent years more vital changes than perhaps ever came to a similar system in any country in the course of a single generation. The emancipation of the serfs has completely and radically transformed the whole economic life of the agricultural peasants and the landed proprietors as well as their relations to each other. Artificial methods of swift intercommunication and transportation have altered the time-honored routes and methods of trade and production, have created new industries and destroyed old ones, and have put the fortunes of whole provinces in the hands of the railroad authorities. Banks and financial institutions of various kinds have sprung up in great numbers and have bound widely separated regions together with meshes of mutual obligation and indebtedness. These changes, complicated and supplemented by others like them, have created everywhere a thousand questions and necessities which previously did not exist, and have so interwoven the interests of separate localities that delay or error in the settlement of a question at one point has a direct influence upon the fortunes of other places often very remote. Every local necessity or calamity, whether it be a drought, the grain beetle, the disorganization of a railroad, an epidemic disease, pleuro-pneumonia among cattle, or industrial stagnation, exerts, without losing its local significance, a wide-spread influence upon the well-being of the empire as a whole. In an economic life thus complicated, one central administration, even though it possess superhuman wisdom and energy, cannot pos

sibly deal with the innumerable questions and problems which, in the absence of popular self-government, necessarily devolve upon it. Whole classes of wants and demands either remain entirely unsatisfied, are inadequately appeased by methods which take no account of local interests, or are met by a series of unsystematic and mutually contradictory measures. Each of these ways of dealing with such wants and demands undermines respect for authority and inspires painful distrust.

The only way to extricate the country from its present position is to summon an independent parliament [Sobrania] consisting of representatives of the zemstvos; to give that parliament a share in the control of the national life, and to securely guarantee personal rights, freedom of thought, and freedom of speech. Such freedom will call into action the best capabilities of the people, will rouse the slumbering life of the nation, and will develop the abundant productive resources of the country. Liberty will do more than the severest repressive measures to crush anarchistic parties hostile to the State. Free discussion will show the error of their theories, and the substitution of vigorous healthful activity for epidemic discontent in the life of the people will deprive them of the field in which they carry on their propaganda.

The Russians are as fit for free institutions as the Bulgarians are, and they feel deep humiliation at being kept so long under guardianship. The desire for such institutions, although forced into concealment, and half stifled by repressive measures, finds expression, nevertheless, in the zemstvos, in the assemblies of the nobles, and in the press. The granting of such institutions, and the calling together of a representative body to preside over them, will give to the nation renewed strength, and renewed faith in the Government and in its own future. When the people of Russia made themselves ready for the recent war, it was with an instinctive feeling that in the great work of freeing kindred nations there was the promise of freedom for themselves. Are such expectations, hopes, and promises never to be realized ?

THE above temperate, patriotic, and courageous address was laid before the Tsar, and he acted upon it; but, unfortunately, his action came too late. On the 12th of March, 1881, he signed a proclamation announcing to the people his intention to summon a national assembly and to grant a constitutional form of government. On the very next day, before this proclamation had been made public, he was assassinated.

George Kennan.

THE PRESIDENT-ELECT AT SPRINGFIELD.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN: A HISTORY.*

BY JOHN G. NICOLAY AND JOHN HAY, PRIVATE SECRETARIES TO THE PRESIDENT.

THE MONTGOMERY CONFEDERACY.

OLLOWING the successive ordinances of secession passed by the cottonStates, their delegations withdrew one by one from Congress. In this final step their senators and members adopted no concerted method, but went according to individual convenience or caprice; some making the briefest announcement of their withdrawal, others delivering addresses of considerable length. These parting declarations contain nothing of historical interest. They are a mere repetition of what they had said many times over in debate: complaints of Northern aggression and allegations of Northern hostility; they failed to make any statement or acknowledgment of the aggressions and hostility on the part of the South against the North. The ceremony of withdrawal, therefore, was formal and perfunctory; pre-announced and recognized as a foregone conclusion, it attracted little attention from Congress or the public. Only two cases were exceptional,- that of Mr. Bouligny, a representative from Louisiana, who, as already mentioned, remained loyal to the Union and retained his seat in the House; and that of Senator Wigfall of Texas, who, radically and outspokenly disloyal, yet kept his seat in the Senate, not only through the remainder of Mr. Buchanan's term, but even during the special session assembled, according to custom, to confirm the nominations made by President Lincoln immediately after his inauguration.

despite its constant avowals of a desire to promote union, was originated and managed by the little clique of Virginia conspirators whose every act, if not preconceived, at least resulted in treasonable duplicity.

The secession conventions of the cottonStates had appointed delegates equal in number to their former senators and representatives in Congress. These met in Montgomery, Alabama, on the 4th day of February, 1861, to form a Southern Confederacy. The Washington caucus, it will be remembered, suggested the 15th of the month. But such had been the success, or, rather, the want of opposition to the movement, that it was probably considered advisable to hasten the programme, and instead of only having preliminary secession complete by the 4th of March, to finish the whole structure of an independent government before the inauguration of President Lincoln. Thus far Mr. Buchanan had not offered the slightest impediment to the insurrection; it might reasonably be inferred that this inaction on his part would continue to the end of his term. Mr. Lincoln would be powerless until officially invested with the executive duties, and thus the formal organization of a Southern Confederacy could proceed at convenient leisure and in perfect immunity from disturbance.

The meeting at Montgomery had its immediate origin in the resolutions of a committee of the Mississippi Legislature, adopted January 29th; and it is another evidence of the secret and swift concert of secession leaders, that in six days thereafter the delegates of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Florida were assembled for conference. The delegates from Texas joined them later on. An organization was effected by choosing Howell Cobb chairman, and the body called itself a Provisional Congress, though it was merely a revolutionary council, invested with no direct representation of the people, but appointed by the secession conventions. Its reactionary spirit was shown in returning to the antiquated and centralizing mode of voting by States. This same rule under the old Congress of the Confederation had produced nothing but delay and impotence, and earned deserved contempt; and these * Copyright by J. G. Nicolay and John Hay, 1886-7. All rights reserved.

One of the remarkable coincidences of the secession conspiracy is, that on the same day which witnessed the meeting of a peace convention in Washington city to deceive and confuse further the public opinion of the North with discussion of an impossible compromise, the delegates of the seceded States convened at Montgomery, Alabama, to consolidate rebellion and prepare for armed resistance. It is not impossible that this was a piece of strategy, purposely designed by the secession leaders; for the Washington peace conference,

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HOWELL COBB, PRESIDENT OF THE FIRST CONFEDERATE CONGRESS. (FROM A PHOTOGRAPH LENT BY GENERAL MARCUS J. WRIGHT.)

identical delegates, after incorporating the rule in their provisional scheme of government, immediately rejected it when framing their permanent one. We may infer that they employed it at the moment, because it was admirably suited to the use of cliques and the purposes of intrigue. Very little more than half the delegates of four States could carry a measure, and the minority of total membership could exercise full power of legislation. A project of government was perfected on February 8th, and the name of the "Confederate States of America" was adopted.

This first project was provisional only, to serve for one year; and the Provisional Congress retained the legislative power for the same period. The temporary continuance of certain United States laws and officials was provided for. On the following day (February 9th) it elected Jefferson Davis of Mississippi President and Alexander H. Stephens of VOL. XXXV.-9.

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