One cannot yet answer. But whatever the harvest, the work of the third and fourth Dumas, carried out in harmony with the Imperial Ministers, has shown that the last dread arbitrament of social war need not come. Revolution is the final recourse, to be undertaken only if a political and social situation is so desperate that all other means must fail. Such is not the case in Russia. There are administrative abuses there. But governmental restrictions press rather less than one might imagine upon the plain workaday people; and compared to those of other nations, they are not exceptional save in degree. It is the educated and so-called upper classes who complain. Taxes elsewhere than in Russia are burdensome and sure as death. Emigration to Siberia will give any peasant the legal privilege of escaping taxation, which in America is the prerogative of her absentee plutocracy alone. The exile system, dwindling for years past, has now been in effect abolished by the refusal of the Duma to make an appropriation for its continuance. The press-censorship is only the open operation of influences tacitly accepted elsewhere--such as in the United States left the Tweed Ring so long uncriticised. The much-condemned passport is actually of no more inconvenience than showing a railway ticket, and it does not come within “forty _sagenes_” of the custom-house inquisition which faces every American citizen on his return home. It is not an error to say that in many matters of individual liberty the Slav enjoys more than the American. In the treatment of subject nations, reliable and neutral witnesses declare that Russia does not approach the rigor of the Prussian bureaucracy in Alsace. Many of the Empire’s restrictions are those which obtained throughout Europe fifty years ago--abuses common to a certain stage of civilization, and of public opinion. These melt away in newer customs, for time is curing much. Once the chariot of progress is started, many evils right themselves in the natural and inevitable upward pressure, and many slough off unnoted. It is not so many years back that in America a black man could be deported to malarial lowlands more deadly than Siberia’s steppes; not so long ago that the English Parliament passed an act requiring all railway-trains to be preceded by a man carrying a red flag. Like the seignorial rights of Germany’s feudal states, anachronisms become outgrown, and fall away.