Again, take the case of a Moscow paper which has published a poem delivered at the time of a public festival, but in which the author had afterwards made some changes. The paper--I do not remember its name--was suppressed. The publisher or the editor, who is likewise said to have been a Russian noble, went to St. Petersburg, and objected that, as his paper appeared under censorship, if any one was to blame it was the censor who had let this poem pass. Zvyerev, however, showed plainly that latter-day tendencies did not please him, and that he only wanted an excuse for taking measures against the paper. Of course such measures mean, under some circumstances, financial ruin; in any case, severe injury to all the contributors. Therefore suppression of the license is an unusually effective means of pressure to bring to bear against the convictions of editors. In this case pressure of such a monstrous kind was attempted as it is to be hoped stands alone in the chapter of censor-tyranny. The editor was told in plain words, by Zvyerev, that he might permit it to be stated that the poem had been smuggled into the paper behind his back by the Jews, and that the minister of the interior would at once grant a license for the reappearance of the paper. The editor, of course, refused the demand, and a new page was added to the book of Russian infamy. Zvyerev is still in office as a worthy assistant to his minister, Plehve. The oppression of independent-minded organs is, however, not the only expedient of Russian policy in regard to the press. Its antithesis is not absent--official support of the revolutionary and provincial press. Russia rejoices in one journal which has not its equal in untruthfulness and diabolical baseness in the whole world, the _Novoye Vremya_. This Panslavic sheet, which is ready to eat all Germans and Jews alive, and which finds no lie too infamous, no invention too childish to serve up to its readers, if only their prejudices are tickled, is openly supported by the Russian government. It therefore contains an incomparably greater amount of news than any other, has consequently the most subscribers, and can pay its contributors and correspondents the best, so that every one who wants to read a paper with plenty of news has to take this noble organ. I found it everywhere in Russian houses, and if I asked the master of the house his opinion of it, the answer was everywhere the same: "Infamous, but indispensable." It is, then, carefully seen that in Russia, as elsewhere, emperors--and other people--do not hear the truth. The autocracy, or rather bureaucracy, surrounds itself with bulwarks which nothing can penetrate. It will need an earthquake to make a breach. This earthquake is, indeed, according to the common opinion of all thinking Russians, nearer than is generally supposed. It is the financial breaking-up of a system now held together only by foreign loans. XXII SOME REALITIES OF THE LEGAL PROFESSION