[28] This was the reply of the Czar to a telegram from the Union of True Russians thanking him for dissolving the second Duma and arresting fifty-five of its members on a charge of treason. Eight of these representatives of the people were afterward sentenced to five years of penal servitude, nine to four years of penal servitude, and ten to exile in Siberia as forced colonists. (_Russian Thought_, St. Petersburg, December, 1907, p. 216.) When Mr. Milyukov returned to St. Petersburg after the delivery of his temperate and dispassionate address in New York, the handful of "true Russians" in the third Duma attacked him with violent and insulting abuse, and Mr. Vladimir Purishkevich, one of their most influential leaders, said to him in open session: "You are a poltroon and traitor, in whose face I would willingly spit!" Such is the spirit of the "true Russians" whom the Czar has asked to help him in bringing about "the peaceful regeneration of our great and holy Russia." [29] The freedom manifesto of October 30, 1905, begins with the words: "We lay upon Our Government the duty of executing Our inflexible will by giving to the people the foundations of civil liberty in the form of real inviolability of personal rights, freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, freedom of public assembly, and freedom of organized association." [30] Stenographic report of the proceedings of the first Russian Duma, St. Petersburg, July 17, 1906. A large part of the Russian Empire has been under martial law ever since the assassination of Alexander II. In 1906 it was in force in sixty-four of the eighty-seven Russian provinces. [31] Upon the shoulders of the peasants the whole framework of the Russian state rests. When the latest census was taken, in 1897, the peasants numbered 97,000,000 in a total population of 126,000,000. Since that time the population has increased to 141,000,000, and the relative proportion of peasants to other classes has grown larger rather than smaller. (Report of the Russian Statistical Department. St. Petersburg, August, 1905.) [32] It is this part of the population that begins to suffer from lack of food when, for any reason, there is complete or partial failure of the crops. Twenty million people, in twenty-two provinces, were reduced to absolute starvation by the famine of 1906, and were kept alive only by governmental relief on a colossal scale. Famine is predicted again this year in the provinces of Kaluga, Tula, Tambof, Samara, Saratof, Viatka, Poltava, and Chernigof. In the province last named the peasants were already mixing weeds with their rye flour in November, 1907. (_Nasha Zhizn_, St. Petersburg, May 23. 1906; _Russian Thought_, St. Petersburg, December, 1907, p. 217.) [33] Report of the Zemstvo Committee on Agricultural Needs in the District of Voronezh, Stuttgart, 1903. This report was published in pamphlet form abroad, because the censor would not allow it to be printed in Russia.