But when people point to the seemingly effectual repression that is now taking place here, and ask how it is possible for the Revolution to continue, they forget that there is a difference—a small but vastly important difference—between the present state of affairs and the period of the late M. Plehve’s _régime_. The difference consists in the fact that before the general strike and the October Manifesto, before even the taking of Port Arthur, Prince Mirsky opened a little window in the tight-closed room of Russian politics by relaxing the stringent Press regulations and letting loose public opinion. The light came in like a flood, and nothing can now drive it out. Repression when public opinion was crushed was a very different thing from repression when every case of it is reported in detail in the newspapers, as now happens. For people can say what they like about the unreality or the non-existence of the liberty of the Press; one has only to buy the Radical newspapers to be convinced that if the Press is not free it is certainly more explicit and more unrestrained in its violence than the Press of any other European country, and some of the comic satirical newspapers might have Marat for editor. Somebody once said that he would have given anything in the world to have half an hour’s private interview with the late Lord Beaconsfield with a pistol, and to obtain from him under the threat of death an exact and complete account of his views and convictions. It would be interesting to perform a similar experiment on Count Witte; whatever the result of it might be, I doubt if there would be found a trace of the placid optimism which is sometimes attributed to him. Count Witte may be attacked for many things; he cannot be accused of a lack of clear-sightedness: not, that is, if he be judged by the utterances which he is known to have made before the outbreak of the war, or by those which he made publicly before entering office, and while the war was still going on. Mirabeau was, in the opinion of Horace Walpole, a ruffian; he was certainly distrusted by both parties, but we know now, though the fact escaped the notice of his contemporaries, that he gauged the forces at work and the probable trend of events with surprising accuracy. We now consider Mirabeau to have been something like a great man. Count Witte has perhaps inspired among all parties a greater distrust than that which was the lot of Mirabeau; but in times such as these clear-sightedness, self-confidence, and capacity for hard work are precious qualities indeed. Nobody denies the possession of these qualities to Count Witte. It is not, therefore, impossible that the future historian may place him in the same niche as Mirabeau in the Pantheon of the world. This, as Horace Walpole says, is speculation, not prophecy. And I revert, or rather arrive, at these conclusions, that a lull in events does not necessarily imply their final cessation; that so