Immediately was sent the telegraphic order to investigate the thing most thoroughly, and if those who were the sufferers had not refused all assistance to the police another couple of dozen would-be rioters would have been sent to Siberia, in order that the existence of a Polish revolution might be proved. A Russian editor, whose paper had been suppressed because of the publication of a revolutionary poem, sought audience of the head of the censorship at the ministry of the interior, in order to obtain permission for the reappearance of the paper. The chief of the department explained to the editor, according to a Russian nobleman, that if he should simply declare to the minister that the revolutionary poem had been smuggled into the paper by Jews, he would immediately obtain permission to publish his paper again! From a source whence I never should have expected such a statement, from a highly conservative aristocrat, an "excellency" in the service of the state, I received in all seriousness the information that only Plehve, in league with Alexeyev, had conjured up the war by holding off the Japanese, simply because in this way he would become so much the more indispensable. Nay, more, it was even indicated to me that the nihilists, who killed Alexander II. at the very moment when the proclamation of a constitution lay upon the table awaiting his signature, could not have found their way to the imperial carriage without help from the police. And the ally of Loris-Melikov, the man who had drawn up the plan, and who best of all knew how near its signature, which must be avoided, the proclamation was, was none other than Plehve! His instinct drove him to the ranks of the reactionaries, for there is little use for people of his caliber in a constitutional state. His anti-Semitic tendencies, which he naturally disavows to every Jewish visitor, are only assumed because people high in position and influence, like the empress dowager, Prince Sergius, and others of the generation of Alexander III., are fanatically anti-Semitic. So even this is not genuine in him. Nothing is but his theatrical ambition to assert himself as long as possible, and to have the nerve-tickling of a tight-rope walker who balances on his wire rope over fixed bayonets.