was so great that the two provinces have been growing more Polish than before the Government Settlement Commission began to Germanize them. Indeed, the work of the Commission has hitherto yielded most unsatisfactory results. A public document shows that it had spent, from its organization in 1886 to the end of 1903, nearly $42,000,000, of which above $25,000,000 was paid for lands already in German hands. When the Commission commenced its labors it paid an average of $34 per acre for land; in 1902 the price had advanced to $87; and in 1903 it reached $111. The Poles resisted more and more the attempt to buy their lands for the extension of German influence. Hence less than eight per cent of the Commission's purchases in 1903 were from Polish owners. In other words, the Commission has been compelled to buy German lands at fancy prices, in order to prevent their falling again into Polish hands. The Polish settlement agencies have beaten the Commission at its own game; and the Prussian Minister of Agriculture admitted to the Diet, that from 1896 to the end of 1903 above 106,000 acres of German lands in the two provinces had been transferred to Polish ownership.

Confronted by such conditions, the Prussian Government resorted to a Draconian remedy. It brought forward a bill forbidding private organizations to acquire and divide lands without the permission of the provincial governor, which must be based upon a certificate from the Settlement Commission to the effect that the agency in question is acting in harmony with German national aims. This will effectively throttle all Polish settlement work. The opposition in the Diet resisted the Government with uncommon vigor, pointing out that the measure was the rankest kind of class legislation, besides being unconstitutional, since the Constitution asserts the equality of all Prussians before the laws. The argument from expediency, however, prevailed with the majority; and the questionable bill became law.

VOL. 95 - NO. 3

The position of the Clerical party in the Empire, and its relations with the Government, came up for an unusual amount of discussion last year, owing to the passage of a bill repealing a section of the Jesuit law. This gave the Government the power to expel foreign Jesuits and to restrict German ones to a limited territory. The repeal, however, is without practical effect, since the paragraph in question has not been enforced for many years; but it caused significant discontent in a large part of the Protestant population, which is growing restive under the extension of Clerical influence with the Government.

Passions were still more deeply stirred by a resolution passed by the Diet, favoring a law to make all elementary schools either Protestant or Catholic, each having exclusively teachers and pupils of the same confession, and boards of school inspectors having representatives of church interests. An intensely sharp agitation followed for months in educational and political circles. The annual gatherings of national teachers' organizations rejected the proposed law with decisive emphasis, as certain to introduce confessionalism into the schools, and to give the clergy of both churches too much influence over them. The National Liberal party, the originator of the objectionable resolution, saw a great movement of protest break out within its ranks; and the younger element of the party, the so-called "Young Liberals," ,"held a convention and strongly declared against the new policy of the leaders.

In a higher sphere of educational life, too, the year was marked by ferment and action. Theological teaching has for some years been the centre around which continued controversy, partly religious, partly political, has revolved. The orthodox wing of the state church has grown bolder in its demand that theological teaching at the universities be brought into harmony with its views, and that the unrestrained freedom of investigation and instruction hitherto enjoyed by the professors of theology be abolished. Alarmed at the grow

was making? That would be a serious handicap for a runner; and so is, to a statesman, a haunting wonder how his deeds will read. Such a secondary conscience, literary in its nature, impairs absorption in the work at hand; and totus in illis is still the recipe for success in great affairs. Let presidents pant for posthumous fame as dying Garfield did, and as may be done in all honor, but let them know that intent and unconscious present achievement is the root from which alone the future bays can grow. You know that saying of Seneca's: "Fame follows merit as surely as the body casts a shadow." He added that the shadow sometimes falls in front, sometimes behind. In your case, your friends would urge you not to be too anxious that it fall in front. Tacitus anticipated Milton in saying that the lust of fame is the last infirmity that a wise man shakes off. For such a glutton of work as you, however, it should be easy to jettison that perilous cargo earlier in the voyage, and to face the future in the proud spirit of the line: Nulla est fama tuum par aequiparare labo

rem.

You have assured your countrymen that you model your public conduct upon Lincoln's. Let us hope that this is not because your published list of the poor creatures among your predecessors in office did not come down to him. But your imitation should include his quality of “dreading praise, not blame." And President Harrison, who said that your chief fault was wanting the millennium (all but the beating of spears into pruning hooks) right off, would scarcely have thought of fitting to you the truthful lines on Lincoln:

He knew to bide his time,
And can his fame abide

reading of Thucydides, - and your admiring friends have told us, with pardoned indiscretion, how your habit is to read the speeches which that historian put into the mouths of Greek statesmen, between train-stops for speeches of your own, in like manner to go down to posterity, one wonders if you never were startled by coming upon unconscious prophecies. There was that description of the Athenian character, for example, made by a Corinthian orator: "They deem the quiet of inaction to be as disagreeable as the most tiresome business. If a man should say of them, in a word, that they were born neither to have peace themselves nor to allow peace to other men, he would simply speak the truth." And if you are ever tempted to think that you succeed because you hit off perfectly the passing mood of your day, you might do well to re-read what Thucydides had to say of popular standards in times of unrest in the Greek cities: "Reckless daring was held to be loyal courage; prudent delay was the excuse of a coward; moderation was the disguise of unmanly weakness; to know everything was to do nothing. Frantic energy was the true quality of a man."

No one has ever accused you of being among the "wiry logicians." Yet they, according to Cobden, make the most "reliable politicians," because, although they may be "liable to false starts,... when once you know their premises you can calculate their course and where to find them." Jefferson and Calhoun were of this stamp. In unpleasing contrast to them, Cobden mentioned a man of what he called the genus sentimentalist. "They are not to be depended on in political action, because they are not masters of their own reasoning powers. They sing songs or declaim about truth, justice, liberty, and the like, but it is only in the same artificial spirit in which they make odes to dewdrops, daisies, etc. They are just as likely to trample on one as the other, notwithstanding."

With you, however, it has not been a

question of a body of political principles, rigorously held and rigidly worked out. You have been content to make your election among the current doctrines of parties. And your procedure seems now to be pretty clearly established. Your violence in denouncing political opponents is equaled only by your coolness in appropriating their programmes. The old motto used to be: Find out what your antagonists want to do, and then do the opposite. But you have improved upon that, so that your own maxim seems to read: Discover what the other party proposes, hold it up to scorn, warn the country against it, and then do it your self. Great men before you have stolen the clothes of the Whigs, but no one has rivaled you in abusing them for not having better clothes to steal.

Yet you believe devoutly in your own party. The fact that it sustains you is proof enough that it deserves your alle

giance and your praises. And you depend upon it as the means to your ends. But there are two sides to that. It also depends upon you-temporarily. If you propose to use it, it intends to use you; and where you think you have wings, you may any day find that you have a weight. Hence no more friendly advice could be given to you, in this great crisis of your political fortunes, than the advice which was given to that other aspiring young man, Vivian Grey: "If by any chance you find yourself independent, never for a moment suppose that you can accomplish your objects by coming forward to fight the battles of a party. They will cheer your successful exertions, and then smile at your youthful zeal; or, crossing themselves for the unexpected succor, be too cowardly to reward their unexpected champion. . . . There is no act of treachery or meanness of which a political party is not capable."

EVERY one knows, or thinks he knows, what Russian Nihilism is; every one has heard of the Russian revolutionary movement; but not every one understands what Russian Liberalism is. Until a few weeks ago it was generally thought, and with reason, to be something amorphous, everything and nothing, a disposition of mind rather than a political programme. But a few weeks ago the Associated Press correspondent began to mention the Russian Liberals as a political group, and Russian Liberalism as a political programme. Just what this group and this programme are is not quite clear to the correspondent in St. Petersburg. Now he mentions a group which he calls the "Conservative Liberals," which, he says, stands with Prince Sviatopolk Mirski. Now he refers

to some "Extremists," wicked people who put sticks in Mirski's wheels and endanger the progress of Russian reform. Again, after the Czar's manifesto, he seems to join with the Extremists' criticism of Mirski's programme. And now that M. Witte is elbowing M. Mirski out of his berth, to take it himself, it is not clear . whether M. Witte is with the Extremists, or with the Conservative Liberals, or with any Liberals at all. The correspondent seems to be at sea, and we are at sea with him.

A few suggestions by one who is not entirely foreign to the Russian Liberal movement may perhaps help the American reader to find his way among the intricacies of late events in St. Petersburg.

Liberalism is not a new creation in Russia. In a sense it has always existed there, as long as there has been any public opinion, for Russian public opinion has always been liberal. But in its present meaning of a political current tending to political reform, Liberalism has existed only since 1861, the year of the emancipation of the serfs. In the forty years which have elapsed since then, Russian Liberalism has passed through three stages. In the sixties it was tinged with landlordism, and was quite unacceptable, in consequence, to the radical political group. Nor did this make it acceptable to the Government. In the eighties, Liberalism was more definite and determined in its demands, but it still was willing to side with the autocracy against the growing revolutionary movement at that time. For a moment the Government was inclined to listen to the Liberal representations, but it turned a deaf ear to Liberalism as soon as the revolutionary movement was stifled. No wonder that now, when the revolutionary movement is rife again, and stronger than ever before, Russian Liberalism is in no hurry to play the part of a mediator. It is now in a radical third stage, in the sense that it does not wish a revolution, but it is uncompromising in its demands that autocracy shall be abolished, as this seems to be the only peaceful issue possible.

One can see, therefore, that Russian Liberalism is very much changed in temper and in its political psychology, so to say. Where it was aristocratic and conservative, it is now democratic and radi

cal.

But does this mean that the aristocratic and conservative elements have entirely disappeared from Russian Liberalism? Not in the least, though these elements are not what they formerly were. They no longer have the lead, and therefore they are the more easily alarmed by the plans of the Extremists.

But what are the Liberals themselves planning? Here again we must state the great difference between the Liberal

schemes of to-day and those of twenty years ago. Twenty years ago, in the eighties, the programme of Russian Liberalism was as wavering as its mood. If we re-read the political pamphlets and papers of that time, we shall find at least five different proposals for political reform, all of them "liberal," but no one of them generally accepted. The most moderate at that time was the scheme of the Nationalistic Liberals of the elder generation, who dreamed of reviving the ancient Russian popular representation of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the so-called Zemsky Sobor, which possessed only a consulting voice, and was thus quite compatible with the preservation of autocracy. Another scheme discussed in some influential circles among the higher officials was the plan to take the existing board of legislation, the Council of State, for a starting-point, and to admit into it some representation from the local self-governing bodies, the socalled Zemstvos. A third scheme was to form a separate representative body out of the representatives of the Zemstvos, but to make of this body an upper house, while a lower house should be directly elected by the people. A fourth scheme was to constitute only one chamber, directly chosen by the people, and to give the people general suffrage. The fifth scheme was to convoke a constitutional assembly freely chosen by the people, and to let this assembly decide what should be the new order of things. This last scheme met the wishes of the Revolutionists and Socialists, who at that time expected from such an assembly a more or less complete overthrow of the existing social order.

In comparison with this medley of programmes and schemes, our present Liberalism shows a much greater unity of opinion. No Liberal questions that representation must be real and not fictitious, that it must represent the people directly, and not the local self-governing bodies; nor is there any doubt among Liberals that the representative body must be given