It was thanks to the initiative of the Empress that the first Duma was dissolved, and that the government began to exercise considerable pressure over the elections in order to prevent the candidates whom it believed it could not trust from being chosen by their constituents. One Minister after another of those whom the Czar appointed in rapid succession, resigned their functions, until at last it was an acknowledged fact in Russia that no honest trial of constitutional government could or would be attempted so long as Alexandra Feodorovna would be there to counteract its existence. When the Revolution broke out in the year 1905, and especially at the time of the disturbances which took place in Moscow, it was the Empress who excited her husband to adopt rigorous measures in order to crush it, measures which led to nothing, and which only made Nicholas II. a little more unpopular than he already was among his subjects. It was related, whether true or not I cannot say, that when the famous Semenovsky Regiment was sent to Moscow to reduce into submission the insurrection which had broken out there, Alexandra Feodorovna had desired to say good-bye to the officers before their departure, and that the only recommendation which she had made to them had been not to show any mercy to the insurgents. She had read without understanding it in the very least, the history of the French Revolution in 1789, and one had often heard her say that to show any weakness or compassion in times of danger was equivalent to signing one’s own death warrant. Her friends were nearly all of them men and women with a bad reputation, and amidst the circle of her own immediate family she had only contrived to make herself enemies. Thanks to her influence, and to her petty personal spite, the young Grand Duke Cyril, the son of the Grand Duke Vladimir, was deprived of his titles and dignities and exiled from Russia for having dared to marry his first cousin, the divorced wife of the Empress’s brother, the Grand Duke of Hesse, the Princess Victoria Melita of Edinburgh. This punishment, however, was promptly cancelled, thanks to the numerous protests which followed upon it from all quarters, but the two people concerned never forgave the Empress her attitude in regard to their union, and we saw an echo of this hostility the other day when the Grand Duke Cyril on the outbreak of the Revolution tried to play the part of Philippe Egalité in the Romanoff family, and went with his regiment to put himself at the disposal of the new government appointed by the Duma.