authorities and rural police, they are to take possession of the estates for their own use.  The Government, in its vain attempts to dislodge them, will have to employ all the troops at its disposal, and this will give the working classes of the towns, led by the revolutionists, an opportunity of destroying the most essential parts of the administrative mechanism.  Thus a great social revolution can be successfully accomplished, and any Zemski Sobor or Parliament which may be convoked will merely have to give a legislative sanction to accomplished facts.

These three groups—­the Liberals, the Social Democrats, and the Socialist Revolutionaries—­constitute what may be called the purely Russian Opposition.  They found their claims and justify their action on utilitarian and philosophic grounds, and demand liberty (in various senses) for themselves and others, independently of race and creed.  This distinguishes them from the fourth group, who claim to represent the subject-nationalities, and who mingle nationalist feelings and aspirations with enthusiasm for liberty and justice in the abstract.

The policy of Russifying these subject-nationalities, which was inaugurated by Alexander III. and maintained by his successor, has failed in its object.  It has increased the use of the Russian language in official procedure, modified the system of instruction in the schools and universities, and brought, nominally, a few schismatic and heretical sheep into the Eastern Orthodox fold, but it has entirely failed to inspire the subject-populations with Russian feeling and national patriotism; on the contrary, it has aroused in them a bitter hostility to Russian nationality, and to the Central Government.  In such of them as have retained their old aspirations of political independence—­notably the Poles—­the semi-latent disaffection has been stimulated; and in those of them which, like the Finlanders and the Armenians, desire merely to preserve the limited autonomy they formerly enjoyed, a sentiment of disaffection has been created.  All of them know very well that in an armed struggle with the dominant Russian nationality they would speedily be crushed, as the Poles were in 1863.  Their disaffection shows itself, therefore, merely in resistance to the obligatory military service, and in an undisguised or thinly veiled attitude of systematic hostility, which causes the Government some anxiety and prevents it from sending to the Far East a large number of troops which would otherwise be available.  They hail, however, with delight the Liberal and revolutionary movements in the hope that the Russians themselves may undermine, and possibly overthrow, the tyrannical Autocratic Power.  Towards this end they would gladly co-operate, and they are endeavouring, therefore, to get into touch with each other; but they have so little in common, and so many mutually antagonistic interests, that they are not likely to succeed in forming a solid coalition.