of the Edict of Nantes by Louis XIV. The constitution of Finland, which Alexander I. on annexing the country in 1809 had solemnly pledged himself to respect, was abolished; its press was silenced; its University degraded; its religion trampled under foot; its best men were banished; ♦1899–1903♦ and all means were employed in the patriotic endeavour to grind down this highly cultured, but non-Slavonic and non-Orthodox, province of the north to the level of the rest of the Empire; with the result that the most loyal and prosperous section of the Czar’s subjects has been turned into the most disloyal and miserable. Thus Germans, Esthonians, Poles, Finns, Circassians, Georgians, Armenians, Mongols, Tartars--all have experienced the Russian rage for uniformity national and religious; and so have even dissenters of Russian blood, like the Old Believers and the Dukhobors, not to mention the Polish and Lithuanian Uniates, whose churches have been confiscated and converted to other uses, whose clergy has been suppressed, and who are forced, under severe penalties, to worship, to be married and buried, and to have their children christened according to the rites of the Orthodox Church.[157] Tyranny is a plant that can only flourish in darkness. The press is, therefore, gagged, public meetings are severely prohibited, and both Church and State assiduously discourage the education of the masses. Elementary schools are insufficient and inefficient, while private initiative is jealously forbidden to supplement the shortcomings of public instruction. The Government does not provide for the people, and will not allow it to provide for itself. The authorities at Moscow have been known to prohibit even factory owners from keeping elementary schools for the improvement of their working people. When such is the state of things in the greatest industrial centre of the Empire, it is not hard to imagine the conditions which prevail in the remote country districts with their dull agricultural population.[158] Hence the necessity for employing foreigners in every department of commercial and industrial life. The success of the foreigner, however, arouses the jealousy of the native, and Russian economists are apt to attribute to the predominance of the former that wretchedness of the Russian masses, which is mainly due to their defective education. Under the circumstances, it is not surprising to find that the Jews suffer as grievously as they did in the Middle Ages. The hostility of a people still barbarous in all essentials has always succeeded in defeating the good intentions of the best Czars, and in heightening the horrors consequent on the despotic temper of the worst. If the treatment of Israel in various countries may be taken as an index to their respective progress on the road to civilisation, Russia must be pronounced as standing at this hour where England stood in the thirteenth century.