The enchantment, however, was of a short duration. The people soon found out that they had put too much confidence in the paper pledge of the Czar, and that they should not have laid their weapons aside. The solemn promise declared from the heights of the throne was broken. One after one the pledged liberties were taken away, and a wave of brutal repression and massacre swept over the tormented land. Only too late one could recollect with the American Russologue Joubert, the ever-new aphorism of Bertrand: "The tree of liberty can grow only when it is watered with the blood of the tyrants." The government recovered its senses after the first collapse, and decided to play its game on the obscurity and ignorance of the army. The simple-minded soldiers, themselves miserable peasants or workingmen, were ordered to shoot and flog their fathers and brothers, their friends and defenders; and they fulfilled their official duty with incomparable brutality. The revolution was betrayed and strangled. Its leaders were shot, hanged, or banished; the free press shut up, liberal parties and meetings forbidden, and once more the monster-bureaucracy held in its claws the palpitating unhappy land. V Let us return to the problem: What is the matter with Russia? What is the cause of its general decay and demoralization? The revolution proved a failure. The masses--the army particularly--were unprepared for carrying out the long cherished ideal. But that was not all. The Russian revolutionary movement has been used to failures and temporary collapses, the organizations have been destroyed and abolished many a time, and yet like a Phoenix they would arise from out the ashes and manifest their significant existence again and again. The cause, to all appearances, lies with the modernized system applied by the bureaucracy in its war with the people--the demoralization of the people. What Nicolas I. could not attain through his iron despotism; what Alexander III. failed to accomplish by means of crudest oppressions and restrictions carried through by such arch-tyrants as Pobyedonostzev, D. Tolstoy, Muravyov, etc.; what had been beyond the reach of Nicolas II. during the dictatorships of his genial assistants of the type of Plehve, the hero of Kishinev, or General Trepov, the man of Bloody Sunday (January, 1905),--this important point was won by the gentleman-butcher, the hangman in the frock-coat, the late premier Stolypin. The credit for having succeeded in breaking the spirit of the nation and for having brought it to the verge of demoralization is largely due to his policy.