Here we can point out only a few of the more general causes that contributed to the triumph of the Czar.  In the first place, the difficulties in the way of common action among the proletariat of Russia are very great.  Millions of peasants, scattered over vast plains, where the great struggle is ever against the forces of nature, cannot effectively combine.  Students of history will observe that even where the grievances are mainly agrarian, as in the France of 1789, the first definite outbreak is wont to occur in great towns.  Russia has no Paris, eager to voice the needs of the many.

Then again, the Russian peasants are rooted in customs and superstitions which cling about the Czar with strange tenacity and are proof against the reasoning of strangers.  Their rising could, therefore, be very partial; besides which, the land is for the most part unsuited to the guerilla tactics that so often have favoured the cause of liberty in mountainous lands.  The Czar and his officials know that the strength of their system lies in the ignorance of the peasants, in the soldierly instincts of their immense army, and in the spread of railways and telegraphs, which enables the central power to crush the beginnings of revolt.  Thus the Czar’s authority, resting incongruously on a faith dumb and grovelling as that of the Dark Ages, and on the latest developments of mechanical science, has been able to defy the tendencies of the age and the strivings of Russian reformers.

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The aim of this work prescribes a survey of those events alone which have made modern States what they are to-day; but the victory of absolutism in Russia has had so enormous an influence on the modern world—­not least in the warping of democracy in France—­that it will be well to examine the operation of other forces which contributed to the set back of reform in that Empire, especially as they involved a change in the relations of the central power to alien races in general, and to the Grand Duchy of Finland in particular.

These forces, or ideals, may be summed up in the old Slavophil motto, “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality.”  These old Muscovite ideals had lent strength to Nicholas I. in his day; and his grandson now determined to appeal to the feeling of Nationality in its narrowest and strongest form.  That instinct, which Mazzini looked on as the means of raising in turn all the peoples of the world to the loftier plane of Humanity, was now to be the chief motive in the propulsion of the Juggernaut car of the Russian autocracy.

The first to feel the weight of the governmental machine were the Jews.  Rightly or wrongly, they were thought to be concerned in the peculations that disgraced the campaign of 1877 and in the plot for the murder of Alexander II.  In quick succession the officials and the populace found out that outrages on the Jews would not be displeasing at headquarters.  The secret once known, the rabble of several towns took