Emigration to the vast untilled fields of Siberia should be carried on with all the efficiency of which the Government is capable. That this is in progress, the figure of four hundred and ninety-one thousand emigrants for the first seven months of 1908 attests. Fifty-nine thousand homeseekers were sent by villages which wished to emigrate thither _en masse_. But care and providence must follow the movement, and insure that the settlers are equipped with the means for safe and permanent establishment. The race-question calls also for a righteous solution. The future must bring the repeal of the old bureaucratic laws of Jewish exclusion, and end the vicious circle of oppression and terrorism against this much wronged people. The chaotic finances of the Empire must be regulated by years of patient work, such as that of the last Duma, through whose agency there is now, for the first time in twenty-two years, a budget surplus. The Duma members, to whom these all-important tasks fall, must plough the fields in all their armor. The autocracy is not their greatest enemy. The history of parliamentary government demonstrates again and again that in an ordered community authority gradually reverts to the national representative assembly. Little by little power slips away from the throne. In England, in 1686, the reign of James II could show Jeffreys’ Bloody Assizes; yet five years later the Parliament was in full and permanent control of the government. The preservation of the country from the nether chaos is, however, a mightier problem. Before the ship of state rides safe in the harbor of true representative government there must come a critical period when the administrative powers are not firmly clasped by the hand of either autocracy or duma. This hiatus-time, when iron repression ceases and sober self-rule begins, is yet to come. Those who must tide the nation over it are such as those pathetically few Octobrists, unpopular because of their bending, craven-seeming policy, and because of the unfree elections that gave them place. Will such a group, when the crucial hour strikes, be allowed peaceably to pilot the vessel? Or will red-handed revolution wrench from their grip the tiller, bereft of the guidance of autocracy? Is it to be evolution or revolution? One cannot deny that a free election to-day would throw out the toiling Octobrists and put in a membership like that of the first Duma. These constructive, unvisionary men are not loved, nor is their progress likely to make them so. They exist as the ruling factor only by virtue of election manipulations and legal interpretations. With this essentially temporary support taken away, the group would be powerless, for every indication shows that the people would not support them or their policies. [Illustration: PEDDLER POLICEMAN RUSSIAN TYPES]