In the past year the "cloudy horizon" has slightly brightened. Grave symptoms have appeared in the seemingly calm atmosphere which suggested Vereshchagin's _All is Quiet on Shipka_. Notwithstanding the strict censorship of dispatches one could easily discern from the news items that the volcano has not been extinguished yet. True, the orgy of the reactionary forces has not abated; freedom of spoken and written word is still a myth; the majority of the Douma is "a trillion times blacker than black"--to use a Bodenheimesque figure; the revolutionary organizations are dragging a pitiful existence in the underground, and the average citizen is still seeking safety from the cossack's knout in phlegmatic splein. Yet signs of gratifying unrest have been manifestly displayed of late in various camps of the Empire. The rapidly developing capitalistic class has come to realize the deadening effect of the bureaucratic regime on industry and commerce, and resolutions have been passed at numerous conventions of manufacturers, bankers, and other big business-men, condemning the stifling policy of the archaic government. The tragicomedy of the Beilis process which revealed the puerile helplessness of the rotten State justice, has united all cultured Russia in a tremendous protest against the existing order; lawyers, journalists, physicians, artists, teachers, and men of other liberal professions, signed fiery resolutions whose _leit-motif_ was Chekhov's sad verdict--"Such life is impossible!" The unrest among the army, and particularly among the navy, has had a great symptomatic significance. Multitudinous arrests among soldiers and sailors, sporadic trials of revolutionary military organizations, frequent transportations and transfers of regiments and vessels, declaration of martial law in some important ports,--such have been the albatrosses of the oncoming storm. After the crash of the proletarian uprising of 1905 the remnants of the revolutionists have concentrated all their forces against the stanchest citadel of Czardom--the army and the navy, justly considering that only a military _coup d'état_ could change things in present day Russia. The situation became definitely threatening last July, during the visit of President Poincaré, when the Russian proletariat, defying all manners and _bon ton_ towards "allied France," suddenly and unexpectedly marred the display of friendly demonstrations by an epidemic outburst of general strikes in St. Petersburg (or _must_ we, by order of Nicolas II., say--Petrograd?) and in other metropolises.