history; and a cultivated Russian of the middle class is saturated with John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, Ruskin, John Morley, Buckle, and Carlyle; whereas Shakespeare, Milton, Byron, and Shelley are treated as Russian classics. Only yesterday I travelled with a man who, although he could not speak English, was intimately conversant with our whole literature, and told me that the whole generation to which he belonged had been taught to find their intellectual food in England and not in France and Germany. “How is it,” he asked me, “that we Russians who live on English thought, and admire and respect you as a nation far more than other nations, have been so long at loggerheads with you politically?” I said that I thought the reason was that, although the cultivated and the average educated Russian knows our literature well, the nation as a whole does not know us, and we do not know Russia at all—for most intelligent Englishmen are ludicrously ignorant of Russia. Besides this, the bureaucratic _régime_ has acted like a barrier between the two countries and fostered and fed on the misunderstanding. As far as politics are concerned things have moved on. Some weeks ago it was possible to believe that the Government had been wantonly hampered in its well-intentioned efforts, now it is only too plain that by their acts they are doing their best to justify the violence of the revolutionaries. The “Proisvol” (arbitrariness) continues on an extensive scale. People in Moscow are arrested every day and without discrimination. Influential people do not dare to inscribe their names on the lists of the Constitutional Democratic Party for fear of being arrested. The police have unlimited powers, and all the methods of the old _régime_ are flourishing once more. I do not believe, as is sure to be objected, that the action of the revolutionaries has rendered this necessary. I do not believe that the best way to fight revolution is by lawless and arbitrary repression. Lastly, and most important, it is not the immorality or the illegality of the methods that I find reprehensible, but their stupidity and ineffectiveness. If all this repression were the iron working of one great central mind, which ruthlessly imposed its will on the nation, breaking down all obstacles and restoring order, it would be excusable. But it is not. I do not believe the Government is responsible for what happens in Moscow; and in Moscow itself the various authorities shift the responsibility on to each other. It is the old story of the bureaucratic system—no responsibility and no individual efficiency, but a happy-go-lucky, drifting, and blind incompetence, striking where it should not strike, being lenient too late, and never foreseeing what is under its very nose. When one comes to think, it is not surprising, considering that the instruments with which Count Witte has to deal are of the old regulation bureaucratic pattern. How, for instance, can the Minister of the Interior, M.