“Without consulting your Minister, call together your whole Council. Let it appear to the public that you can determine and act for yourself. Come forward to your people; lay aside the wretched formalities of a king and speak to your subjects with the spirit of a man and in the language of a gentleman. Tell them you have been fatally deceived: the acknowledgment will be no disgrace, but rather an honour to your understanding. Tell them you are determined to remove every cause of complaint against your Government; that you will give your confidence to no man that does not possess the confidence of your subjects; and leave to themselves to determine, by their conduct at a future election, whether or not it be in reality the general sense of the nation that their rights have been arbitrarily invaded....” Hope, indeed, springs eternal in the human breast; otherwise people would not persist in giving such admirable, such simple advice, seeing how little chance there is that it will ever be adopted. Yesterday morning a man threw a bomb at the Governor-General’s carriage, killing his _aide-de-camp_ and losing his own life, while the Governor-General escaped miraculously. About an hour after the explosion I went to the Hôtel Dresden with a naval officer who was staying with me. It appeared that the man who had thrown the bomb was disguised as a naval officer; a man in such a costume is seldom seen in Moscow, and is certain to attract attention. I and my naval friend had already been to the hotel in the morning; when we returned the hotel keeper said to us, “You are suspected of having thrown the bomb.” It was easy to prove that we were not guilty, owing to the presence of the dead man who had done the deed. His naked body was lying in a house on one side of the Square; he had a horrible wound in his head. The attitude of the general public with regard to the attempt was curious. When we got home, people said to us, “Have you heard the news? What a pity that two men were killed uselessly, and that the Governor-General escaped!” They talked about it exactly as if they had narrowly missed backing a winner. Later I heard of two girls who quarrelled because one of them said that she was sorry the _aide-de-camp_ had been killed. The lower classes do not seem to pay the slightest attention to the matter. In the middle classes people have lost all moral sense with regard to these outrages. They consider that throwing bombs is a kind of lynch-law; they do not distinguish one individual from another, the honest from the dishonest, the harmless from the guilty. But the people who are to be blamed are those who, by bringing certain things to pass, have created this feeling. When the Government takes no notice of outrages committed on the people, and allows the perpetrators to go scot free, it is not to be wondered that the people are “more than usual calm” when they hear that a governor has been blown up. It is none the less very demoralising for the present