_May 19th._--A report from St. Petersburg, dated the 14th instant, says: “The news that Count Schuvaloff has been to Berlin and was received by your Serene Highness has not failed to cause some surprise here. It was reported immediately that Schuvaloff had been sent to Berlin with a special mission and, as I learn from a well-informed source, even Prince Gortschakoff’s own mind was not quite at rest with regard to this rumour. The explanation is that the varying influence of the Chief of the Third Department is unpleasant to the Chancellor, all the more so as Prince Gortschakoff is aware that Schuvaloff dislikes him, and the two Ministers are not always in agreement on questions of principle.” _May 21st._--We hear from St. Petersburg: “Prince Gortschakoff hopes soon to receive communications respecting the International.... The _tête-à-tête_ with Austria is certainly the best means of proceeding in the matter. At this time of day a repressive treatment of the disease is not in itself enough. The origin of the evil must be discovered, and with it the antidote. Russia has resolved to suppress with the utmost energy all disorders in which this dangerous association is involved. The further communications to be made by me on the result of the conference proposed by Count Andrassy are awaited here with interest.” Bucher has left here to-day to join the Prince at Varzin. _May 26th._--The following very academic, but none the less noteworthy, dissertation written by Aegidi, as he says on instructions from Varzin, may be read in to-day’s _Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung_: “The attitude of the Conservative element in a country is of the greatest consequence for its sound development. If there be no party which can adopt into its programme the demands and requirements of a new period, the altered conditions and principles of the present time, then the two conceptions, conservative and reactionary, must be fatally confounded together. The friends of the new order of things, whose aims have been to a certain extent achieved, and who would therefore be glad to make common cause with Conservatives in securing and consolidating the existing order, cannot go hand in hand with reaction. They therefore occupy an unstable position between the reactionary element and those who want to go still further; but they remain at all times in closer sympathy with the latter than with the former. Thus the State at every new stage is deprived of the requisite steadying influences, and drifts into a current which can only favour a determined reaction.