There can be no doubt that the political atmosphere has in the last two days become sultry. The tension of feeling in the Duma has ominously increased, and the feeling of the country has manifested itself in increasing disorders. Even among the troops mutinies have been reported from five different towns, and the sailors at the various ports are said to be in a dangerously excited state. It is now little more than a month since the Duma met, and by looking back one can judge to a certain degree of the effect its existence has had on the nation at large. Some people say the Duma has done nothing but talk. It seems to me it would be rather difficult for a Parliament, especially a new one, to pass measures of a complicated and important nature in dumb show. Even the House of Commons, after centuries of experience, has not arrived at this. There are four Bills in committee at this moment. The agrarian question is, it is true, being discussed at length before the committee has drafted the Bill. But it should be borne in mind that the situation of the present Duma is abnormal. It proposes to elaborate measures based on certain principles which the Government have declared to be inadmissible. The Government morally deny the existence of the Duma. A Minister goes so far as to request a newspaper correspondent to state in the influential organ he represents that the Parliament which has been summoned by his Sovereign is no better than a revolutionary meeting, and that it is the result of the revolutionary machinations of his immediate predecessor in office. Besides this, the official organ of the Government publishes telegrams—which, even if they are not (as there is strong reason to suppose) manufactured in St. Petersburg or written to order by willing officials, can only be representative of a small fraction of popular opinion—inciting the population against the Duma, and begging the Emperor to dissolve it. When one reads these telegrams one is convinced that they cannot represent a widely-spread opinion, for they run somewhat after this fashion: “Great, unlimited autocrat, listen to us true Russians, dissolve the herd of rebels, who by means of Jewish money have usurped the position of representatives of the people. Pay no attention to their seditious cries, but listen rather to us, whose only wish is that thy Heaven-given, anointed, unlimited, multitudinous, incarnadined autocratitude should remain unlimited. Give us less bread and more taxes. We are perfectly contented. We have everything our heart desires, so long as thou remainest unlimited.”