Printed reports of the debates were sent broadcast, and for the first time since Russia came into being the peasantry saw things as they really were.  They had always attributed their wrongs to the nobility, who, they believed, had cheated them out of their land and their rights under the Emancipation Act.  But now it was not the nobility, not the hated Boyars who were cruelly refusing to give them land and liberty, but it was the Little Father, he whom they had always trusted and adored!

It is a critical moment when the last illusion drops from the eyes of a confiding people.  The Duma at this moment was engaged in a task of supreme difficulty and responsibility.  Millions of people hung upon its words and acts.  A group of inexperienced but terribly determined men were facing an equally determined group of well-seasoned officials, veterans in the art of governing.  Never was there greater need of calmness and wisdom, and at this very time a wild revolutionary faction was doing its utmost to inflame the passions of a peasantry already maddened with a sense of wrong and betrayal, who in gusts of destructive rage were burning, pillaging, and carrying terror into the remotest parts of the Empire.

Even while the Duma was demanding this larger measure of liberty and of authority over the Ministry, that body had already initiated and put in force new and more vigorous methods of suppression.  Under M. Durnovo, Minister of the Interior, a law had been promulgated known as the Law of Reinforced Defense.  Under the provisions of this law, high officials, or subordinates designated by them, were clothed with authority to arrest, imprison, and punish with exile or death, without warrant, without accusation, or any judicial procedure whatever.

On July 16, 1906, M. Makaroff, Assistant Secretary of the Interior, appeared personally before the Duma; and in answer to thirty-three interpellations concerning as many specific cases of imprisonment without resort to the courts, frankly replied:  “Yes.  We have held the persons named in prison for the time mentioned without warrant or accusation; and some of these, and many others, have been exiled to Siberia.  But it is a precaution demanded by the situation and the circumstances; a precaution we are authorized to take by the Law of Reinforced Defense.”

In October of last year (1905) the world was made glad by a manifesto issued by the Tsar containing these words:  “In obedience to our inflexible will, we hereby make it the duty of our Government to give to our beloved people freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, freedom of public assembly, freedom of association, and real inviolability of personal rights.”  The Tsar had also, with the same solemnity, declared:  “No law shall take effect without the sanction of the Duma, which is also to have participation in the control of the officials.”  Yet, Ministers and Governors General, or subordinates appointed by them, may at their own discretion imprison, exile, or kill in defiance of Imperial command, and find ample protection in the Law of Reinforced Defense!