struggling with the accumulated weight of centuries of governmental crime. In the book under notice he sums up in a consecutive whole what he had previously stated in fragments. Beginning with the old Russia, which antedated the founding of the present Romanoff dynasty, under which all the previous elements and tendencies toward misgovernment have become crystallized, he states some very remarkable facts in the political history of his native land which are not known to the general reader. One of the sources of discouragement to the observer of Russian affairs has been the dread that there was nothing in the traditions and training of the people to serve as a foundation for a more just and liberal form of government and an establishment of social order, once revolution had wrought its work in overthrowing the present imperialism. Stepniak dissipates this notion very effectively, and throws a new light on the elements entering into the problem. Previous to the time of Ruric, the various principalities now making up Imperial Russia were governed on a democratic principle even more complete than that which inspired the republics of Italy in their brightest days. The people of each literally determined their own laws and alliances by open council, in which the utmost freedom of debate occurred and the meanest citizen had a voice. True, princes were at the head of these governments, but they were purely electoral, and were so completely at the mercy of the people that they could be dislodged at any time. They were merely military chiefs, with no voice in the making of the laws and with no fixed time of holding position, merely servants of the people with vastly less power and responsibility than are possessed by any one of the higher officials who rule under a representative system. These democracies, though turbulent, disorderly, and quarrelsome, served effectively for several centuries as the medium for the promotion of a high degree of prosperity; and several of them, notably that of great Novgorod, became leading commercial marts of Europe. The tradition is still faintly preserved in the grand annual fair, to which traders flock from all quarters of the East. Internal wars and the tremendous pressure of the Tartar hordes which afterward overran Russia in large part, tended to consolidate these democracies under one ruler. It would be beyond our purpose to trace even in outline the steps by which the haughty autocracy of Tzardom was finally fastened on the country, but it is a singular fact that in the _mir_, or system of village communes, which exists side by side with imperialism in Russia, we have to-day a survival in an humble form of the old Sclav democracies. Stepniak finds in this a hopeful basis for building up free and successful government, when revolution shall have thrown off the incubus of the Romanoffs and the bureaucratic system, of which this dynasty is both the creator and the slave.