They all seemed instinctively to drift toward the telegraph booth. They were the men who had suffered a blow and were nonplussed. Their faith in the “Little Father” was now irretrievably shaken. In the Duma conservative and academic professors, stung to desperation, hammered and pounded the ministry, and finally introduced a resolution (which, incidentally, they asked a peasant to read) expressing their mistrust of the ministers, demanding their resignation, and a new and responsible ministry. This was parliamentary. The peasants acted differently--they voted in agreement, because they were told it was right to do so. What they did of their own initiative was to send scores of telegrams, which strangely enough the imperial wires carried that night, carried till they were hot. “We have been refused land, liberty, and new laws. Tell everybody.” This was the burden of the messages. That was the muzhik’s impulse. These messages were sent by sad men just coming to the realization of their situation. But having done this they were not materially relieved. They sat together on the lobby benches and conversed in low tones. When adjournment was announced they went sorrowfully away, several never to return. One resigned--utterly discouraged. A few days later one died as a result of his heart-breaking disappointment--Andrianov of Simbirsk government--and the Duma rose in the middle of the afternoon as a token of respect. Several remained ill in their lodgings for a week. It is difficult for us in America to understand and appreciate such intense feeling as these simple peasants reveal, but to them this Duma was the most serious event in their lives. Now they were utterly crushed by the realization that apparently the Czar did not care for his people, that the Duma was a mockery and a farce, and that if they were to escape from their plight it must be through their efforts. The telegrams sent that afternoon constituted the biggest piece of revolutionary propaganda since the Father Gapon labor demonstrators were shot down in cold blood in the square of the Winter Palace in January, 1905. “How can you fight?” I asked of some peasants who had been sent as delegates to St. Petersburg, and who intimated that this refusal of the government’s meant open rebellion. “The soldiers have taken our arms, it is true,” they replied. “But we have left our wood-axes and our scythes. We can cut telegraph posts. We can burn barracks and landlords’ houses.” It is a commonplace psychological fact that the slower a man is to anger the more terrible will his wrath be. The muzhik is grim and determined. As for time, it does not exist for him. At any railroad junction in Russia one may see any number of peasants waiting about all night or all day between trains. Six, eight, ten hours’ delay in making connections troubles no peasant.