and that therefore it is the moral duty of every newspaper to give publicity to such cases. The Minister of the Interior has deprived the Golos of the right of inserting advertisements during a period of one month, for the publication of the article.'

A year ago, the Golos also contained an account of the trial of Paul Popoff, a chief of police and councillor of State, who had been arrested for whipping sixty peasants of the Government of Rjazan, for non-payment of taxes. The details of his brutality as revealed before the court were terrible. Immediately before inflicting the punishment, Popoff ordered the rods to be first made soft by heating in the oven and then dipped in brine, and during the whipping he ordered the rods to be frequently wiped with linen cloths which had been dipped in brine and then sprinkled with powdered salt. As the whipping progressed, Popoff cried out to the sheriff: "Strike harder, more evenly, and lift the rods higher!" At the same time he trampled on the heads of the dying victims. To one peasant who complained of pains in his neck and breast, Popoff said: "Put down your head and you will soon be well." That peasant received one hundred and twenty blows by Popoff's own counting. When the peasant Alexander Dykin begged for water, Popoff forbade his having it and cried out; "Salt him a little instead!" One peasant, Konstantinoff, offered to pay the remaining taxes of one of the wretched victims. Popoff replied: "We shall first whip him; thereafter you may pay for him." For these unparalleled outrages, Popoff was sentenced to three months' arrest. General Trepoff, whose barbarities secured the acquittal of Vera Sassulitch, and his own dismissal from the office of Chief of Secret Police, has now, since the late Winter Palace explosion, been appointed military governor of the Winter Palace!

Yet, in view of such a condition of things as facts like these reveal, the London Times (February 20th, 1880) says:

"It is not by revolution that Russia can be regenerated. The central authority of the Czar must be upheld, if that order is to be maintained which is the indispensable condition of further progress. Conspiracies of this character," alluding to the Winter Palace plot, "must be punished with sufficient severity to crush them."

In April, 1879, the Minister of War, Milutine, issued some Draconic instructions regarding the courts-martial held over civilians accused of revolutionary designs. The Nihilists immediately responded by a posted proclamation to the army, which said:

“There is in Russia a power which could save the cause of liberty and hasten her victory. This power is the army. It has recently experienced the disastrous results of the present mode of government in Russia; can it already have forgotten the past or be ignorant of the root of the evil? The Russian army of today is more miserable than when, on its return from the Napoleonic war of 1813-15, it found Russia under a state of siege and its people poverty-stricken; for now it looks upon starving peasants, an immense State deficit, fraud in finance, Jesuits in the schools, and spies in power, with whom-as we find in the recent ukase concerning courts-martial for political offences,-even members of the imperial family are accomplices! The hero from Shipka and the martyr from the Balkans are employed as the degraded executioners of wretched peasants and suffering laborers. An officer who heroically defied death during those terrible attacks on Plevna, may now be under compulsion to shoot his own sister for participation in an indignation meeting; or to parade over a grave holding the earthly remains of a murdered brother, a victim of the infamous secret police. What a fearful position! Among the heroes from the war against Napoleon, were found men who could not endure such a position and who, therefore, formed secret societies aiming at a change in the Russian régime. If the Russian army has still the heart in the right spot, it will do likewise, so far as is possible to altered conditions. Now, there is better prospect of success than in 1815-25, because the officers and nobles no longer stand alone. The despotism must fall sooner or later, though the crisis may be prolonged for years and demand many more victims. It is, above all, the upright and honorable men within the army who can lessen the number of these victims and speed the downfall of despotism."

In another and recent address, the Executive Committee state that the object of the Nihilists is to effect a radical change in the social and political conditions of Russia, and to arouse in the nation a vivid consciousness of its rights. To this end the committee would have the Russians learn to understand the true nature and promoting causes of the people's forlorn position; then they will find ways to wrest their liberty from their oppressors, and will see that neither to exterminate the Turk nor support the Sclav, nor to give life and property to

the service of a clique which cares only for itself, is the first duty of the Russian patriot; but to labor for the freedom and true prosperity of the Russian upon Russian soil.

The appeal to the army was soon followed by another proclamation under the usual heading Zemlja i Volja, addressed "To the Russian People," which said among other things:

"Surely the liberty we crave and strive toward is not exorbitant; we only desire the right to free expression of our thoughts, the right to act independently and in accordance with our convictions; to have a voice in the State's affairs, and to know that our persons are protected against official whims. These surely are elementary rights of mankind, rights to which we are entitled because of our being human, and for whose vindication we call our brothers' aid."

And the Zemija i Volja journal asks :

"What would we do with a constitution under present circumstances? So long as the country is denied all justice, a constitution would be of no use to it. Let us be given justice without distinction of persons, and we shall be satisfied. But if the State chariot goes on as before, an old programme must be maintained; it is-Death to the court camarilla and to all criminal officials.'

In an article commenting on the attempted assassination of the Czar, the Obstchina (or "Commune") of Geneva, says:

"We execrate personal government especially, because it has outraged by all its acts every feeling of justice and honor; because it systematically opposes freedom of thought, speech and education; because it supports for egotistical reasons social corruption and political immorality, since it finds in these both support and accomplices; because it makes law and justice the instruments of its personal interests; because it exhausts the material forces of the land, and lives at the expense of the welfare of coming generations; because by its home and foreign policy it has brought about a breach between our land and the rest of Europe; and because after being weakened and martyred, we are exposed to the derision and contempt of our enemies."

The programme of the Executive Committee, given in the number of the Narodnia Volja, and issued at the date when its press was captured by the police, after condemning the Russian Government as a system of oppression of the people which must be overthrown by force, revolution or conspiracy

before reforms can be secured, states that this done, the power shall immediately be vested in an assembly of organization, which shall be elected by all Russians without distinction of class or property; that this assembly will act in consonance with the will of its constituencies; that socialistic revolutionists will present to the assembly of organization their own programme which demands:

"1. Permanent popular representation with full power over all general State questions; 2. Wide local self-government, with election assured for all duties, the independence of the rural commune and the economical independence of the people; 3. The independence of the rural commune as an economical administrative whole; 4. The principle that the land is the property of the people; 5. A system of measures having in view the transfer of all works and factories to workingmen; 6. Complete liberty of conscience, speech, the press, public meetings, associations and electoral agitation; 7. General electoral rights, without any conditional or property limits whatever; 8. Replacement of the standing army by a territorial army."

In another number of the Narodnia Volja we find this pregnant paragraph:

"The problem of the socialistic revolutionary party is the subversion of the present form of government, and the subjection of the authority of the State to the people. . . . The transfer of the State power to the hands of the people would give our history quite another direction. A representative assembly would create a complete change in all our economic and State relations. Once let the government be deposed, and the nation would arrange itself far better, maybe, than we could hope."

The recent manifesto of the Russian students is at once a succinct statement of their grievances and a strong protest.* It affirms that any effort at genuine education in Russia is surrounded by difficulties which can scarcely be surmounted, and which are expressly devised to that end. High prices,

* Taking up the official educational statistics, we find that in 1873, in 123 gymnasia and 44 progymnasia, out of 41,712 students, only 1,229 finished their course, while 10,792 were expelled. In 1874 only 1,090 finished the course, of which only 773 were passed in the final examinations. The general result obtained from these statistics is that a year ago less than 12 per cent. received any school education at all. What must then be the condition now! The universities are intended to be shops for manufacture of government automata, and those who lack some requisite are dismissed and are usually-especially if poor and of liberal proclivities-placed in the army as privates, or—if taken from the medical academies-as subsurgeons.

exclusion of practical subjects, compulsory attention to abstract studies of questions and notions having no bearing on real life or modern interests, absence of any system of bodily training,these and a great number of other restrictions and hindrances are cited in proof of the Government's premeditated hostility to the real enlightenment of the masses.

"We have become convinced," says the manifesto, "by time and experience, that the Government is the enemy of the people and society, and from an enemy you can only take away by force and command, not by prayer and supplication; but we ask society to protest in every legal way for us; and we ask society to do this in order that it may see the inutility of its petitions and protests! ...Look at what is being done among you! Continual hunger among the people side by side with senseless luxury in high places; insufficiency of peasant land, while free land is given away right and left to different officials; interference with the selfgovernment of the Zemstvo; complete arbitrary license in the administration, unprecedented development of espionage, persecution of the press, and an enormous increase of taxes.... Let society do nothing, but go on as before, blindly and humbly, beneath the yoke; we young men cannot make peace with the existing order of things. We believe that a day of judgment will come, for all official criminals, before whom justice is now silent, and then the very stones will cry out, and the terrible tribunal of the people will unfold before the eyes of its oppressors the long list of their crimes!"

We have seen what the Nihilists profess, let us observe how their faith has been exemplified, in what manner they have died for it.

At Archangel, on the 26th of April, 1879, the young Nihilist Serge Bobokoff, accused of armed resistance to the police, was tried and condemned to death. "I belong," said he, when permitted to address the court, "to the social revolutionary party; I gave it all my powers; would never have left the peaceful propaganda, if the Government itself had not forced me to resort to arms. On October 30th, when I was officially informed of the new order, that every exile trying to escape from the place assigned him would be transported to Eastern Siberia, I was seized with the desire to try to escape, and, at the cost of my life, to protest against the despotic order. Now kill me if you choose, shoot or hang me; but be sure that neither my exile nor my execution can stop our great