The Douma, the long-cherished ideal of the people, was transformed from a house of representatives into an ante-room of the government, into a shameful profanation of parliamentarism. The first two Doumas gave an overwhelming opposition to the government, and the latter found an easy way to get rid of its disagreeable opponents by dissolving the Assemblies and suing the deputies as rebels. The unscrupulous Senate issued a series of "modifications" to the electoral laws, and thus insured for the later Doumas a "desirable" element. Having deprived the majority of the populace of voting rights, giving all means of assistance and protection to the "Black Hundreds"--criminal societies flourishing under the standard of patriotism, terrifying the average voter and driving him into political absenteeism, the government succeeded in gaining a majority of obsequious manikins who have sold the people for a pottage of lentils and have debased the Douma to a purely instrumental force in the hands of Stolypin & Co. Even the moderate liberals of the type of Professor Paul Milyoukov or Prince Eugene Troubetzkoy, who have been ardent supporters of the Douma as a means of educating the people on constitutional ideas,--even they are gradually losing their rosy expectations. Representative Maklakov, a man to whom even the late Stolypin, his bitterest antagonist, paid the highest respect, in his report on the Douma cried in despair: "One could have hoped that the Douma was useless. Alas! It is getting harmful." VI About a year ago the writer of these lines thus summarized the "Contemporaneous Russian Nihilism": The bureaucracy celebrates its victory over the people. The heretofore united forces are divided, the sacred ideal polluted, the bitterly-fought-for constitution brought down to a mocking buffonade, and the "Mighty Ham," whose coming was predicted a few years ago by the illustrious Merezhkovski, has his day in the degradated country. The Russian giant who had temporarily awakened after a slumber of centuries, snores again hopelessly. Over the vast continent reigns a suffocating atmosphere of despair, decay, and demoralization. A thick fog of nihilism, not the Nihilism of Turgenyev's times, but nihilism in its direct negative meaning, enwraps the martyred land of the Czar, and one can hardly discern a bright spot on the cloudy horizon.