it was necessary to provide them with land of their own; the State, therefore, bought what was considered sufficient for the purpose from the landowners, handed it over to the peasants, and recouped itself by imposing a land-tax on the peasants to expire after a period of forty-nine years.  This tax was felt to be exceedingly onerous, and in addition to this by the beginning of the twentieth century it became clear that the land acquired in 1861 was not nearly enough to support a growing population.  These factors, together with the disastrous Russo-Japanese war, which revealed an appalling state of corruption and incompetency in the government of the country, furnished the revolutionaries with an opportunity which was not to be missed.  A rapid series of military and naval mutinies, agrarian disorders, assassinations of obnoxious officials, socialist risings in the towns, during the year 1905, culminating in the universal strike of October, brought the Government to its knees, and on the 17th of the same month the Tsar issued his manifesto granting freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and a representative assembly.  The revolution had, apparently, won on the constitutional issue.

Yet what looked like the end of bureaucratic absolutism proved to be the destruction of the revolutionary party.  Had the reformers of 1905 concentrated their energies upon the task of turning the new legislature into an adequate check upon the bureaucratic system, there is little doubt they would have succeeded.  As it was their success in this direction was only partial.  It is true that a Duma still sits at the Taurida Palace at Petrograd, but it is elected on a narrow property franchise, and its relations with the bureaucracy are as yet not properly defined; it criticises but it possesses no real control.  This failure of the revolution was almost wholly due to the revolutionaries themselves, who, instead of confining their attacks to the Government machine, sought to undermine the entire structure of society and to overthrow the moral and religious ideals of the nation.  Moreover, their attitude was entirely negative, and they possessed little or no constructive ability of any kind.  Even the first Duma, which contained the ablest politicians among the reformers, did not succeed in passing acts of parliament, affirming the most elementary principles of civil liberty; and it damaged itself irreparably in the eyes of the country by refusing to condemn “terrorism” while demanding an amnesty for all political offenders.  The unique opportunity which the first Duma afforded was frittered away in futile bickerings and wordy attacks upon the Government.