permanently from the Duma and that sixteen of them be handed over to the government for imprisonment.  The demand was a challenge to the whole Duma, since it called into question the right of the Duma to determine its own membership.  Obviously, if members of parliament are to be dismissed whenever an autocratic government orders it, there is an end of parliamentary government.  The demand created a tremendous sensation and gave rise to a long and exciting debate.  Before it was ended, however, Nicholas II ordered the Duma dissolved.  On June 3d the Second Duma met the fate of its predecessor, having lasted one hundred days.

IV

As on the former occasion, arrangements were at once begun to bring about the election of another and more subservient Duma.  It is significant that throughout Nicholas II and his Cabinet recognized the imperative necessity of maintaining the institution in form.  They dared not abolish it, greatly as they would have liked to do so.  On the day that the Duma was dissolved the Czar, asserting his divine right to enact and repeal laws at will, disregarding again the solemn assurances of the October Manifesto, by edict changed the electoral laws, consulting neither the Duma nor the Imperial Council.  This new law greatly decreased the representation of the city workers and the peasants in the Duma and correspondingly increased the representation of the rich landowners and capitalists.  A docile and “loyal” Duma was thus made certain, and no one was very much surprised when the elections, held in September, resulted in an immense reactionary majority.  When the Third Duma met on December 14, 1907, the reactionaries were as strong as the Socialist and Labor groups had been in the previous Duma, and of the reactionaries the group of members of the Black Hundreds was a majority.

In the mean time there had been the familiar rule of brutal reaction.  Most of the Social Democratic members of the Second Duma were arrested and condemned for high treason, being sent to prison and to Siberia.  New laws and regulations restricting the press were proclaimed and enforced with increasing severity.  By comparison with the next two years, the period from 1905 to 1907 was a period of freedom.  After the election of the Third Duma the bureaucracy grew ever bolder.  Books and leaflets which had been circulated openly and with perfect freedom during 1905 and 1906 were forbidden, and, moreover, their authors were arrested and sentenced to long terms of imprisonment.  While the law still granted freedom of assemblage and the right to organize meetings, these rights did not exist as realities.  Everywhere the Black Hundreds held sway, patronized by the Czar, who wore their emblem and refused to permit the punishment of any of their members, even though they might be found guilty by the courts.