The ukase had gone forth to give the widest representation at the polls. The command was followed out in a system by which every class had its own deputies in the nominating colleges that elected the Duma members. Among the peasantry each _volost_ had two deputies; every thousand industrials had one, the nobility, the salaried clerks, the bourgeois in the cities, the Cossack stanitzas, the boards of trade, the universities, the Holy Synod, the aboriginal Buriat tribesmen,--each had special representation. Uninterfered with for the most part by officialdom, all Russia crowded to the polls, every man believing that his ideal was now, at last, on the eve of realization. The peasants who called for land, the workmen who wished for higher wages, the Intellectuals with their slogan of universal education, the submerged races with dreams of reborn nationalities, the ambitious with visions of power, the venal with hopes of plunder, each and all thought their hopes were to spring at once into the actual and the visual. In such a fever-time the men to whom official service meant the slow toilsome improvement of conditions by self-sacrificing devotion to the routine of administration, who could offer as pre-nomination pledges only earnest study and conscientious action on the legal matters presented, were passed by in the hot aspiring canvass for delegates. Those who believed all things and promised all things, whose fervency of expectation fed the universal hope, whose preaching held that, the way once cleared, Russia could at a bound reach the plane to which other countries had so long and toilsomely struggled, those of fiery faith which would consume every obstacle--these were the men whom the people ratified and whom the nation sent to St. Petersburg for the first Duma. It was a band of hot heads and eager hearts that assembled, echoing their constituents’ desires, crying for all things and at once. They were saturated with the history of the French Revolution, they felt confident that their coming meant the end of the old régime, and belief in their own power was the pledge of the future. Their first official act threw down the gauntlet to autocracy. In the reply to the Crown, passed during their first day’s session, the final paragraphs read:-- The most numerous part of the population, the hard-working peasants, impatiently await the satisfaction of their acute want of land; and the first Russian State Duma would be recreant in its duty were it to fail to establish a law to meet this primary want by resorting to the use of lands belonging to the State, the Crown, the Royal family, all monastic and state lands, also private landed property, on the principles of eminent domain. The spiritual union of Russia’s different nationalities is possible only by meeting the needs of each one of them, and by preserving and developing their national characteristics. The Duma will try to satisfy these wants.