This was the “comparative tranquillity” which the chroniclers of Russian events ascribe to the country between 1907 and 1917. Quarterly notices of the number of political executions were put into small type in English and American journals, and from the sombre silence that brooded over the land there issued at times the lurid message of assassination. In 1909 occurred the astounding revelation of the secret-police spy and professed Socialist Azeff, and it became known that outrages were instigated by the police in order to strengthen their system. The former head of the police had to be sentenced to five years’ imprisonment; the head of the secret police of St. Petersburg was assassinated. In 1911 Stolypin was permitted by the Tsar to suspend the Imperial Council and the Duma, so that he could avail himself of the clause of the constitution which enabled him to pass laws while the councils were not sitting; and on September 14th, while Nicholas sat in his box in the opera at Kieff, he had the horror of witnessing the murder of his complaisant minister. Still he clung to his poor rags of autocracy. Still religious adventurers and spiritist mediums plied their lucratic charlatanry in the palaces. Still the flower of the young generation rotted in the overcrowded jails or languished in Siberia. The jails had a “maximum accommodation” for 107,000 prisoners, and in 1910 about 180,000 men and women were crowded into them. Typhus flourished in them. Suicides of prisoners rose to 160 in a single month. The most brutal outrages were committed on young women and men. These facts one learned, as I experienced at the time, by a laborious comparison of the statements of little-read writers and statistics. To the world at large a different picture was offered. Men were told how, in 1906, a group of affrighted Polish peasants, headed by an abbess, came to St. Petersburg to inquire if it was really true that (as zealous Roman Catholic proselytisers had told them) the Tsar had made his submission to the Pope. They saw a minister, on Easter morn, and to their solemn salutation, “Christ is risen,” he blunderingly replied, “Good Day”; and their hearts sank. But they also saw Nicholas, and to their faltering religious salute he replied cheerfully, “In truth He is risen,” and they fell sobbing at his feet. Or it was the festival of Poltava in 1909, when Nicholas, seeing his carriage surrounded by a dense throng of peasants, alighted and talked familiarly with them for two hours. And there was the story of how at Christmas, 1912, when the members of the Duma were presented to him, he summoned the shrinking peasant-deputies from the last row and honoured them above the others. Nicholas II knew quite well what was happening in Russia. His small mind thought that tasting the food of soldiers and sailors--before a camera--visiting the hospitals, and embracing carefully-selected peasants would save the autocracy in the twentieth century.