"In Russia, the feelings of right and justice, which are systematically and artificially kept down and repressed, and which have no outlet in public life, concentrate themselves with their full weight in the verdict of a jury. That which the press had no liberty of saying during long years, is given vent to in the debates of a Court of Justice. An accusation is raised on account of a deed which, though punishable as a crime in itself, has been produced and nurtured by a system of administrative arbitrariness and gross ill-treatment that stands morally deep below the deed in question--a system of corruption which cannot be attacked legally, nay, which enjoys all the honours the State can award. And who can help it if an injustice committed day after day, in the name of the State, without any expiation, weighs more heavily upon the public conscience than the act of a single person who, boldly risking his or her own life, rises with a feeling of the deepest indignation against so rotten a system of Government? It is but too natural, this wrathful utterance of the popular voice, when it declares that a high official, who, trusting in the practical approval of the Imperial favour, ordains corporal punishment according to his arbitrary caprice against defenceless prisoners, is guilty of a greater offence than he who feels driven, by a passionate notion of justice, to constitute himself, of his own free will, an avenger of the public conscience.... If, in a State afflicted with political sickness, the institution of the jury had fallen so deep as to work with the mechanical certainty of a military court, and to heed nothing but the points of view of jurisprudence, without being touched by the current of moral aspirations, thus merely registering, with Byzantine obedience, the paragraphs of a code of law: such a phenomenon--keeping, as it would, the Government in a dangerous error as regards public life--would be far more reprehensible than that verdict of 'not guilty' by which a whole system of Government was practically condemned." The Russian Government system Herr von Holtzendorff, who personally belongs to a very moderate political party, brands as "a system of arbitrary police ordinances, and of the virtual sovereignty of the Adjutants-General of the Czar--a system of administrative deportations, of despotic arrestations, of press-gagging--a swashbuckler's government." Another German writer of some distinction, Dr. Henry Jaques, observes--