successful, there seems no reason why Prince Bismarck should be blamed for a method which found favour with Richelieu and the elder Pitt, as well as with Mazarin and Sir Robert Walpole. The cause of the Chancellor's ire this year was, it must be allowed, not unreasonable. The Bundesrath, which represents all that remains of the old Federal Diet, showed its origin in its constitution. The preponderance of the smaller States from 1815 had rendered the intrigues of Russia, Prussia, and Austria possible at Frankfurt ; and such was the jealousy with which these States guarded their interests that in 1866 and again in 1871, when the new Empire supervened, their privileges and voting power were left untouched. Prussia in the new Bundesrath, of which she was practically both the head and the arm, was content with seventeen votes, the number she had possessed in the ancient Diet, leaving to the minor States the forty-one votes, by means of which they could there render all government impossible. On April 2 there came before the Bundesrath the trifling question whether postoffice orders should be exempt from a receipt tax, which the Reichsrath was to be asked to ratify. Prussia, Bavaria, and Saxony, the three most important States in the Empire, numbering thirty-three millions of inhabitants, and representing twentyeight votes in the Diet, were strongly opposed to such a proposal. The thirteen minor States, under the leadership of Wurtemburg, being able to command thirty votes, although they represented only an aggregate of seven and a half millions of inhabitants, opposed the vote and carried the exemption. It can scarcely be supposed that the present was a solitary instance of the obstacles which the German Chancellor had to encounter in working the Constitution. In fact, it was well known that on numerous matters, though hitherto of small importance, the delegates of the minor States had outvoted the proposals of Prussia, and the stamp tax was merely the battle-ground on which Prince Bismarck had determined to fight out the question. Three days after the vote of the Federal Council, and without a word of warning or apparent consultation with his colleagues, Prince Bismarck handed to the Emperor his resignation, pleading increasing ill-health as the cause. The Emperor's action was, however, as prompt and more decisive than his Chancellor's, for a few hours after receiving the latter's resignation, he refused to accept it in the following words :

"To your petition of the 6th instant I reply to you that I do not at all underrate the difficulties in which you may be placed by a conflict of the duties imposed on you by the Imperial Constitution, with the responsibility attaching to you; but that I do not see myself thereby induced to relieve you of your office because of your believing it impossible for you in any one specific case to respond to the task accorded you by Articles 16 and 17 of the Imperial Constitution. I must, on the contrary, leave it to you to submit to me and to the Federal Council such proposals as are

of intended concessions to the Poles, which, however, could hardly be reconciled with the publication of a decree on January 16 prohibiting the use of the Polish language in girls' schools at Warsaw. Numerous arrests and prosecutions of Nihilists, too, continued to take place in all parts of the empire, and a considerable number of officers of the army were imprisoned on account of their connection with the Nihilist organisation. On January 29 a number of Nihilists and others concerned in the great robbery of 2,000,000 roubles from the Imperial Treasury chest at Kherson for revolutionary purposes, were convicted by the military tribunal at Odessa. Among them were three ladies, who took the chief part in the robbery; one, the Baroness Vitten, was sentenced to penal servitude for life; another was a sister of the Red Cross Society who had greatly distinguished herself in nursing the sick and wounded during the war, and a third was the daughter of a lieutenant-general. The following day (January 30) the secret printing-press of the revolutionary organ, Narodnaya Vola, was discovered by the police, who broke into the house where it was worked after a desperate struggle, in which one of the occupants was killed and the police superintendent wounded. Nearly the whole of the third issue of the paper, containing the programme of the Executive Committee, was captured by the police. This document stated that the only way to obtain reforms was to overthrow the Government by revolution or conspiracy; that power should then be transferred to an Assembly of Organisation, elected by all Russians without distinction of class or property; and that the following reforms should be submitted to that assembly:1. Permanent popular representation, with full power over all general questions of State. 2. Extensive local self-government, with officials elected by the people. 3. Each rural commune to have independent powers of administration over its own affairs, including all financial matters. 4. Adoption of the principle that the land is the property of the people. 5. Transfer of all works and factories to working men. 6. Complete liberty of conscience, speech, the press, association, and electoral agitation. 7. Universal suffrage. 8. Replacement of the standing army by a territorial army. A few days after (February 5) another attempt was made on the life of the Czar, this time in his own palace. About seven o'clock in the evening, just as the Czar was proceeding with the Duchess of Edinburgh and other members of his family to the dining-room in the Winter Palace at St. Petersburg, an explosion, supposed to have been produced by dynamite, took place in a cellar below a guard-room which was situated on the next floor to that of the dining-room. Ten soldiers of the Finland regiment, who were at that time in the guard-room, were killed by the explosion, and about fifty wounded, but the dining-room was only slightly damaged. The boldness of this attempt, and the evidence which it afforded of the inefficiency of the police, produced great consternation in St. Petersburg, and induced the Emperor to take

failed. On the other hand, it seemed scarcely probable that if the Chancellor wished to retain any semblance of a party following in the Landtag or the Reichsrath he would have run so obvious a risk of alienating the Conservatives and National Liberals, who could still form a majority, in the illusory hope of being able to reconstitute a majority out of the discordant elements of which the minorities in both Chambers were composed. These are, however, questions of which the future can alone furnish the key. The first practical outcome of Prince Bismarck's tenure of office as Minister of Commerce, was the appointment by Royal decree (Nov. 19) of a Committee of Trade on Agriculture, whose functions it was to examine all economical questions, and to report on the needs of the country. The committee or council was to be formed of seventy-five members named for five years; of these, forty-five were to be chosen by the King for twice that number elected by the Chamber of Commerce, the trade corporations, and the Agricultural Associations. The remaining thirty, of whom at least one-half were to be actual working men, were to be selected by the Ministers of Commerce, Public Works, and Agriculture, and their names to be approved by the King.

The idea of extending the system of the Zollverein so as to include Austria-Hungary, the Danubian and Scandinavian States, and, if possible, Holland and Switzerland, which the German Chancellor is supposed to nurse, made but little progress during the year, in consequence of the difficulties arising from the antagonism between the rival productive tariffs of the two empires.

The origin of the Judenhetz, which to the disgrace of Liberal Germany has been recently allowed to occupy so prominent a place in home politics, can scarcely be attributed to any particular date. From the very commencement of the year the orthodox clergy of Berlin, under the leadership of Hofprediger Stöcker, seem to have done their utmost to excite public feeling against the Semitic race. The Ultramontane press gave its full approval to their comrade, and Professor Heinrich Von Treitschke, the eminent historian, justified it. His argument was that the internal state of Germany, in face of its widespread Socialism and its external policy, produced a condition of things which rendered the preponderance of the Jewish element a source of danger. According to the census of 1871 there were in Spain 6,000 Jews, in Italy 40,000, in France and Great Britain 45,000 each, but in Germany there were 512,000, and in Austria probably not far short of a million. In Prussia alone their number had increased from 124,000 in 1816 to 340,000 in 1875, of whom the majority were emigrants from Eastern Europe, representing the democracy of the race; whilst the Jews of Western Europe were descended for the most part from the aristocracy of the race which had found a home in Spain and Portugal. These arguments were combated with vigour by Professor Graetz and others, who maintained that if the Jews possessed more influence in Germany than elsewhere, it was because their mental capacities enabled them

without treading the dangerous path of radical reform, introduced a new system of rule which made him very popular in the country. He first directed his attention to the universities, which had been the hotbeds of Nihilism, and he relaxed in many respects those draconic laws fettering the liberty of the students, which had driven so many of them to the desperate alternative of suicide or sedition. This important change was followed by the resignation of Count Tolstoï, author of the laws in question, on May 3, and the appointment in his place of M. Sabouroff. Count Tolstoï was called "the promoter of Nihilism in spite of himself," on account of his practice of expelling students from the universities for trifling offences, thereby ruining their career and driving them into Nihilism; while M. Sabouroff, who as curator of the university of Dorpat had acquired a great reputation for tact in the management of youth, strove on the other hand to render cases of expulsion as rare as possible by giving the students greater liberty, and thereby diminishing the provocatives to rebellion. The same system was adopted by Count Melikoff with regard to the nation generally; several political offenders were pardoned, others had their sentences commuted, others again were let off with a reprimand after an interview with the Count, in which the latter endeavoured by argument and persuasion to convince them of the folly of their conduct. Pacification and conciliation were the leading ideas of the new policy.

The Emperor, who appeared completely broken down, both mentally and physically, since the attempt in the Winter Palace, did not interfere in the slightest degree with the dictator's proceedings; and the government, being now in the hands of a man of resolute will, became, while far more autocratic than it had been under the weak and vacillating Alexander II., also a much more effective machine for the eradication of the evils from which the State had been suffering so long.

It was too great an anomaly, however, to retain Count Melikoff as dictator while the Emperor remained the nominal sovereign of Russia. The arrangement was necessarily a temporary one, and on August 20 an ukase was issued placing the administration of the country on a more normal footing. The object, according to this document, of the appointment of Count Melikoff with extraordinary powers as chief of a supreme executive commission was to put an end to the attempts of evil-doers to subvert the Government and social order in Russia. This object had, by the concentration of all the powers of the State in combating the spirit of sedition, been so far attained that the maintenance of social order could now be effected by ordinary legal means, with some extension of the jurisdiction of the Minister of the Interior. The Czar had, therefore, decided as follows: First, that the supreme executive commission be abolished, and its functions transferred to the Ministry of the Interior. Second, that the third section of the Imperial Chancellery (the department of the secret police) be also

abolished, and a special department formed in the Ministry of the Interior to conduct the affairs hitherto dealt with by the third section, pending the fusion of all the police offices of the empire in one department of the above Ministry. Third, that the corps of gendarmes be placed under the direction of the Minister of the Interior as its chief. Fourth, that the governor-general and other authorities, in cases where under the ukase of February 24 they had to refer to the chief of the supreme commission, shall in future address themselves to the Minister of the Interior, to whom is given the supreme direction in the treatment of all offences against the State. It will be seen from the terms of this ukase that although the post of chief of the supreme executive commission had been nominally abolished, most of its functions were transferred to the Minister of the Interior; and the latter appointment was conferred upon Count Melikoff on the same date as that of the ukase, so that in fact he was retained as the chief adviser of the Emperor under another name. The Russian Liberals, always on the alert for some indication of approaching reforms, attached a further significance to the ukase which it did not really possess. They inferred from the abolition of the detested "third section "the arbitrary tool of the caprices of emperors and high officials in Russia-that the system of secret imprisonment and banishment without trial would cease, and they looked upon this as the first step towards the grant of a constitution. Their rejoicings, however, were premature. The secret police, though placed under the Minister of the Interior, retained all its former functions, and was maintained at its former strength; banishments to Siberia were as frequent as ever, and no sign was given by the Government of any desire to grant free institutions to its subjects. Even the press, though it was allowed to discuss public questions with somewhat more freedom than before, was warned by Count Melikoff to take care not to publish anything that might be displeasing to the Government; and a new journal, the Rosya, which, on the faith of the expected reforms, was started as a Liberal organ, was speedily punished for criticism of the Ministry by the prohibition of its sale in the streets. Count Melikoff, in a word, had been appointed to put down Nihilism, not to make reforms; and like a true soldier he punctually executed his task. He not only succeeded in putting an end to Nihilist outrages, but captured the principal agents of the Nihilist conspiracy. Sixteen persons, including three women, were tried in November for complicity in the murder of Prince Krapotkin, and the three attempts to assassinate the Czar. This trial showed that most of the Nihilist outrages had been committed by a band composed of a few persons who seemed to have but little connection with the general body of Nihilists. Two of the accused were hanged on November 16; the rest were sentenced to hard labour for life. It is remarkable that although during the autumn and winter there was terrible distress in Russia, owing to the bad