This hesitating attitude on the part of the Government encouraged other sections of the educated classes to give expression to their long pent-up political aspirations.  On the heels of the Zemstvo delegates appeared the barristers, who discussed the existing evils from the juridical point of view, and prescribed what they considered the necessary remedies.  Then came municipalities of the large towns, corporations of various kinds, academic leagues, medical faculties, learned societies, and miscellaneous gatherings, all demanding reforms.  Great banquets were organised, and very strong speeches, which would have led in Plehve’s time to the immediate arrest of the orators, were delivered and published without provoking police intervention.

In the memorandum presented to the Minister of the Interior by the Zemstvo Congress, and in the resolutions passed by the other corporate bodies, we see reflected the grievances and aspirations of the great majority of the educated classes.

The theory propounded in these documents is that a lawless, arbitrary bureaucracy, which seeks to exclude the people from all participation in the management of public affairs, has come between the nation and the Supreme Power, and that it is necessary to eliminate at once this baneful intermediary and inaugurate the so-called “reign of law.”  For this purpose the petitioners and orators demanded: 

(1) Inviolability of person and domicile, so that no one should be troubled by the police without a warrant from an independent magistrate, and no one punished without a regular trial;

(2) Freedom of conscience, of speech, and of the Press, together with the right of holding public meetings and forming associations;

(3) Greater freedom and increased activity of the local self-government, rural and municipal;

(4) An assembly of freely elected representatives, who should participate in the legislative activity and control the administration in all its branches;

(5) The immediate convocation of a constituent assembly, which should frame a Constitution on these lines.

Of these requirements the last two are considered by far the most important.  The truth is that the educated classes have come to be possessed of an ardent desire for genuine parliamentary institutions on a broad, democratic basis, and neither improvements in the bureaucratic organisation, nor even a Zemski Sobor in the sense of a Consultative Assembly, would satisfy them.  They imagine that with a full-fledged constitution they would be guaranteed, not only against administrative oppression, but even against military reverses such as they have recently experienced in the Far East—­an opinion in which those who know by experience how military unreadiness and inefficiency can be combined with parliamentary institutions will hardly feel inclined to concur.