This morning, December 27th, there is considerable movement and traffic in the streets; the small shops are open, and the tobacconists. News has come from St. Petersburg of the Electorate Law. The question is now whether it will satisfy the people. Firing is still going on; they say a factory is being attacked. The troops who were supposed to be disaffected have proved absolutely loyal. The one way to make them loyal was to throw bombs at them. The policemen are now armed with rifles and bayonets. I asked an educated man this afternoon if he thought the Electorate Law would satisfy people. He said he thought not. He said that the people demanded a far wider suffrage law. “Are you in favour yourself of universal suffrage?” I asked. “No,” he answered; “but when I see that the whole people demand it, I submit to the majority. The Government has as yet _given_ nothing; everything has been torn from it, and more will have to be torn from it.” One learns here at any rate not to generalise and not to prophesy. A cabman said this afternoon: “There is an illness abroad, we are sick, it will pass—but God remains.” I agree with him. I do not believe that it is a case of bricks falling out of a wall until the wall falls down, but of a young tree shedding bark. The illness, however, is a severe one, and it is idle to blame the patient for the violence of his symptoms and the doctor for the inadequacy of his remedies. The people to blame are those who made the patient ill by feeding him on poison. And some of these have already met with their just reward. CHAPTER VII MOSCOW AFTER THE RISING MOSCOW, _January 1, 1906_. If it is difficult—and it seems to be difficult to the verge of impossibility—for the historian of the present day to write impartially about political movements which happened in the days of Queen Elizabeth and of Mary Queen of Scots, how infinitely more difficult must it be to arrive at an impartial view of events when one is oneself in the centre of them and living among the actors who are contributing to what is afterwards called history! The historian solves the question by frankly affiliating himself to one side (like Froude or Macaulay or Taine), and he is probably right in doing this; I notice, also, that our most eminent correspondents do the same. Therefore I confess at once that I am in no way free from prejudices, and I make no pretence of invincible impartiality; only I have seen and heard enough of both sides to learn one thing—that the two parties who are now engaged in strife in Russia are both right or both wrong. I will try to the best of my ability to stifle my own feelings, and, like a piece of blotting-paper which absorbs red or black ink indiscriminately, try to reproduce as best I can fragments of what I absorb.