in the original draft, the Czar’s historic title of “Autocrat” had not
been given him. A debate followed, and brought about the declarations
which defined the parties of the third Duma. Bishop Mitrophane,
of the Right, or reactionary party, rose. He said in the name of
his group that the Address to the Throne must contain the phrase
“Autocrat of all the Russias.” Lawyer Plevako seconded, threatening
to secede if the proper title were not incorporated. Paul Milyoukov
spoke hotly for the opposing Cadets, asking whether the country was
or was not under a constitution. He declared the new election law to
be contrary to the original ukase and an act of force. Others of the
Left, among them orator Maklakov of the Cadets, declaimed against
the election law by which this Duma was constituted. They were not
politic, these spokesmen, but harsh and dogmatic, yielding none
of the courtier-respect that makes up for so much absence of real
yielding. For the Octobrists, Alexander Goutchkov led the debate. His
speech revealed that they operated, not with the bludgeon, but with
the Damascus blade. They were of flexible obstinacy and opportunism,
stirring up no sleeping dogs, bending to rise again. Goutchkov slipped
adroitly into his speech the disputed word constitution, thus: “We do
not believe that the Czar’s power has been diminished. The Emperor
has become free, for the Constitution has delivered him from court
camarillas and the hierarchy of chinovniks.” Thanks largely to his
tact, the Octo brists won. The Address, without “Autocrat,” was passed
by a vote of two to one. But it passed at the cost of self-separation
by the right wing of the reactionaries, who withdrew.
The answer of the Administration came sharply from Prime Minister
Stolypin:--
The manifesto of imperial power has borne witness at all times to the
people that the autocratic power, created by history and the free will
of the monarch, constitutes the most precious benefit of the political
state of Russia; for it is this power and this free will that are
alone capable, as the tutelary source of existing constitutions, of
saving Russia in times of trouble, of guaranteeing the state from the
dangers that threaten it, and of bringing back the country to the way
of order and historic truth.
He called upon the Chamber to incorporate the recognition of the
“Autocracy.”
A hundred members protested. Many of the Cadets walked out. To the
Octobrists, barely a quorum, fell the humiliating duty of recalling
their own address and of inserting, despite the scorn, the fateful
word. So shaken was the group itself by the conflict that of its one
hundred and sixty members but ninety-five united in the caucus that
elected officers and committee members. Alexander Goutchkov was chosen
chairman, Baron Meyendorf, Priest Bjeloussov, and Radsjauko, officers.
Among the heads of committees were Prince Wollanski, and Peasant
Kusovkov. In spite of the stigma of reaction popularly imposed upon
them, these were not unrepresentative men.
The distracted Duma got slowly under way, and the Prime Minister
brought before them his proposed policy of administration.
M. Stolypin’s address to the Duma, November 16, 1907, stated that:--
1. The destructive movements of the party of the extreme Left have
resulted in brigandage and anarchy. Order will be the first duty of
the Government.
2. Agrarian relief is the first necessity, and this by a system of
small proprietors.
3. Local self-government and administrative reforms will be formulated
and presented to the Duma.
Business got centred on these practical subjects. Discussions as to
whether or not there was an autocracy gave place to famine-relief
measures and railway-rate studies. The absenting delegates of the Left
and Right, who had retreated to their tents in the wrangle over the
Czar’s titles, and had left the forlorn little band of constructive
Octobrists to carry on the work of legislation, now returned. The
proceedings began to take parliamentary form.
The Budget came on, the Ministers of the Government presenting their
projects for discussion. In the heat of debate, the Minister of
Finance, M. Kakovtsev, exclaimed, “Thank God, we have no parliament
yet!” The fact that an Imperial Minister was presenting his budget to
an elected assembly showed the reality, but the war on names rose
up afresh. The Duma officially declared the Minister’s expression
unfortunate. He threatened to resign unless the house apologized.
The Left again exploded in outcries, called out that the Duma was a
farce, threw in their votes as more fuel for the flame of discord, and
deserted the hall when they were in the minority. Still the little band
of moderates chose the self-abnegating, unspectacular part, and gave
the apology that avoided a crisis.
But now came up a matter wherein the dispute was not over a name or a
title, but a reality. The Government, upheld by the Czar, the Court,
and much public sympathy, proposed a programme for a new navy. It
called for the immediate allocation of one hundred and eleven million
roubles, and the expenditure in ten years, of over a billion roubles.
In the state of the country this entailed a fearful burden, perhaps the
loss of the gold standard. The outwardly supine members, in rows like
grenadiers, voted against the project. By 194 to 78 it was lost.
The Minister of Finance shortly afterwards undertook to issue railway
bonds without the Duma’s consent. With a rebuke, for which this time no
apology was asked or given, his estimate was cut down by one rouble,
and voted. The Amur Railway was authorized, though three hundred
million roubles are its prospective toll. The sole remaining Pacific
port of Russia, Vladivostok, is thereby linked with the Irkutsk and
Trans-Baikal districts of Siberia, and so doubly insured against an
eastern enemy.
After a lengthy session the third Duma adjourned, but not by violence.
It could show as results two hundred bills passed, a budget thoroughly
scrutinized and ratified, and much faithful work in committee. More
important still, the Parliament, by forbearance and patience, had
made itself a part of the machinery of government, and had shown that
a national legislature did not mean expropriation, and a partitioned
Russia.
At the end, fiery Maklakov of the Cadets, he who early in the session
had cried out that all was a farce, admitted that “the third Duma has
lost none of its rights, it is systematically extending them.” All
honor to those whose self-suppression and patience won.
The thin edge of the wedge had been driven in under absolutism by
the third Duma, but little could one foresee that a half-dozen quiet
blows would, during the fourth Duma’s session, bring autocracy to the
greatest crisis it has encountered since it decreed a legislature. The
heart of the situation lies in a naval bill submitting to the Duma
matters which the Constitution reserves to the control of the Emperor.
Strangely, too, the Czar is himself the abettor, if not the originator,
of the supplanting.
In May, 1906, the Czar decided to create the “Naval General Staff.”
One hundred thousand roubles a year were needed, and the money must
be sought of the Duma. The first two assemblies being so violent, the
measure lay in abeyance, to the great injury of the service. Since
the regeneration of the navy was one of the measures made painfully
necessary by the Japanese War, M. Stolypin had a bill drafted, in three
clauses: one ratifying the creation of the “Naval General Staff,” a
second furnishing an annual sum for its operation, a third supplying a
fund for contingencies. No feature of the creation, save the financial
aspect, came at all within the legal jurisdiction of the Duma. Yet the
Premier had the organization itself brought before the Assembly.
The deputies criticised the institution, modified it, sliced the
estimates. Assuming the judicial functions of a court of last
appeal, they voted the money and passed the bill, which M. Stolypin
then submitted to the upper chamber. In view of the overstepping of
domain, the bill was, after a lucid exposition of the law by the
ex-Controller-General, thrown out.
The matter was next submitted to the Czar himself, who authorized
its reintroduction in the Duma. A second time the measure was passed
and sent to the Council. M. Durnovo, ex-Minister, ablest of the
Conservatives, and candidate for the Premiership, made a notable
speech. He proved clearly the trespass upon the rights reserved to the
Crown, showed that such precedents would build up an artificial claim
which could not later be combated, while the allowance of participation
in one instance gave a warrant for demanding interference in any and
every proposal. The bill was a blow at the very heart of monarchical
government, and a degree of democracy not allowed even in republican
France. But, defiantly, M. Stolypin held his ground. The anomaly was
presented of Conservatives decrying the Premier for undermining the
dynasty, with the Emperor himself supporting the culprit. Thus has the
former government minority been converted into a majority,--the measure
passed by the small margin of twelve.
The reactionaries have bitter feud with this Premier. He has, it is
allowed, so enlarged the functions of the deputies by handing over
to them, one after another, the vital prerogatives of the autocracy,
that no later action can ever disestablish the Duma. The Empire is
now governed through a unified cabinet; the important prerogative of
appointing the governors-general has been exercised by the Premier,
rather than by the Czar, since June 16, 1906. Russia has marched far on
its upward way.
Great, however, is the task ahead. Of all that the Duma can achieve
the country has supreme need. The agrarian question calls aloud for
solution, and the peasants’ future depends on land-relief. The Emperor
has given instructions for the sale of most of the Crown domains and
those of the Imperial Family. The nobles are being encouraged to sell
to the tenants, on notes guaranteed by the Imperial land bank. Firm
and able hands must guide this improvement, promoting the division
of estates left to run wild, but avoiding the pitfalls of threatened
property-rights.
Individual enterprise must be awakened, which will in the end bring
about more scientific rotation and intensive farming. The old system
leaves fallow thirty-three per cent of the arable land--an area equal
to the whole ploughed acreage of the United States. In western Europe
but seven per cent is fallow, and the value of the harvest per acre
in Russia is less than a third that of Germany. The policy adopted in
the Agrarian Law of November 9, 1906, for the gradual breaking-up of
the communistic Mirs, and the division of the common lands, at the
villagers’ option, into freehold plots, is a wise one. In 1907, the
year following the law’s promulgation, 2617 peasants, in the government
of Ekaterinoslav had become individual proprietors. Under the Land Act
of 1909 one million farms had been taken up for private ownership in
the first six months of the law’s operation.
Emigration to the vast untilled fields of Siberia should be carried on
with all the efficiency of which the Government is capable. That this
is in progress, the figure of four hundred and ninety-one thousand
emigrants for the first seven months of 1908 attests. Fifty-nine
thousand homeseekers were sent by villages which wished to emigrate
thither _en masse_. But care and providence must follow the movement,
and insure that the settlers are equipped with the means for safe and
permanent establishment.
The race-question calls also for a righteous solution. The future must
bring the repeal of the old bureaucratic laws of Jewish exclusion, and
end the vicious circle of oppression and terrorism against this much
wronged people. The chaotic finances of the Empire must be regulated
by years of patient work, such as that of the last Duma, through whose
agency there is now, for the first time in twenty-two years, a budget
surplus.
The Duma members, to whom these all-important tasks fall, must plough
the fields in all their armor. The autocracy is not their greatest
enemy. The history of parliamentary government demonstrates again and
again that in an ordered community authority gradually reverts to the
national representative assembly. Little by little power slips away
from the throne. In England, in 1686, the reign of James II could show
Jeffreys’ Bloody Assizes; yet five years later the Parliament was in
full and permanent control of the government.
The preservation of the country from the nether chaos is, however, a
mightier problem. Before the ship of state rides safe in the harbor
of true representative government there must come a critical period
when the administrative powers are not firmly clasped by the hand of
either autocracy or duma. This hiatus-time, when iron repression ceases
and sober self-rule begins, is yet to come. Those who must tide the
nation over it are such as those pathetically few Octobrists, unpopular
because of their bending, craven-seeming policy, and because of the
unfree elections that gave them place. Will such a group, when the
crucial hour strikes, be allowed peaceably to pilot the vessel? Or will
red-handed revolution wrench from their grip the tiller, bereft of the
guidance of autocracy? Is it to be evolution or revolution?
One cannot deny that a free election to-day would throw out the toiling
Octobrists and put in a membership like that of the first Duma. These
constructive, unvisionary men are not loved, nor is their progress
likely to make them so. They exist as the ruling factor only by
virtue of election manipulations and legal interpretations. With this
essentially temporary support taken away, the group would be powerless,
for every indication shows that the people would not support them or
their policies.
[Illustration: PEDDLER POLICEMAN RUSSIAN TYPES]
Even Moscow, their former stronghold, fell away in the 1909 elections.
There is throughout the country an undercurrent of fierce demand
for an immediate millennium, with Liberty as the guiding grace and
some particular party as its escort. A song that has become almost
an anthem, “Spurn with us that ancient tyrant,” chanted softly by
the school-boys to the tune of the _Marseillaise_,--this tells the
tale of what is in the air, and in the blood of the people. The most
poorly-suppressed desire is insatiate to hack away with one blow
the abuses that have, through the centuries, rooted themselves deep
in Russian society. The experience of the various revolutionary and
terrorist movements proves that their votaries are capable of daring
any death for their creeds, and of swimming to their imaged goal in
a sea of blood. Let the conservative Octobrist group once succeed
in concentrating power in the Duma, and then let a free election
substitute for them such men as were in the first Duma, and the Russian
Revolution has become a fact.
It is a commonplace to compare the situation with that of France in
1790. There is, however, one fundamental difference. France possessed
a numerous and economically powerful bourgeoisie, from whom political
rights had been withheld. This class included many strong men moved
to a unity of political desire. They were able in the first place to
work up into a place of dominance. After the interval of supplanting
terrorism, they retook by their own efforts the power which, save for
the periods of despotic militarism, they have since maintained. In
Russia the conservative middle-class is numerically very weak, and
its representatives are unable to seize and hold control themselves.
They possess it now only precariously, by the external propping of
weakening absolutism. Will Russia’s Octobrists, after performing the
function of filching power from the autocracy, meet, at the hands of a
new Robespierre, the fate of the high-idealed Gironde?
One cannot yet answer. But whatever the harvest, the work of the third
and fourth Dumas, carried out in harmony with the Imperial Ministers,
has shown that the last dread arbitrament of social war need not
come. Revolution is the final recourse, to be undertaken only if a
political and social situation is so desperate that all other means
must fail. Such is not the case in Russia. There are administrative
abuses there. But governmental restrictions press rather less than one
might imagine upon the plain workaday people; and compared to those
of other nations, they are not exceptional save in degree. It is the
educated and so-called upper classes who complain. Taxes elsewhere than
in Russia are burdensome and sure as death. Emigration to Siberia will
give any peasant the legal privilege of escaping taxation, which in
America is the prerogative of her absentee plutocracy alone. The exile
system, dwindling for years past, has now been in effect abolished by
the refusal of the Duma to make an appropriation for its continuance.
The press-censorship is only the open operation of influences tacitly
accepted elsewhere--such as in the United States left the Tweed Ring
so long uncriticised. The much-condemned passport is actually of no
more inconvenience than showing a railway ticket, and it does not come
within “forty _sagenes_” of the custom-house inquisition which faces
every American citizen on his return home.
It is not an error to say that in many matters of individual liberty
the Slav enjoys more than the American. In the treatment of subject
nations, reliable and neutral witnesses declare that Russia does not
approach the rigor of the Prussian bureaucracy in Alsace. Many of
the Empire’s restrictions are those which obtained throughout Europe
fifty years ago--abuses common to a certain stage of civilization,
and of public opinion. These melt away in newer customs, for time
is curing much. Once the chariot of progress is started, many evils
right themselves in the natural and inevitable upward pressure, and
many slough off unnoted. It is not so many years back that in America
a black man could be deported to malarial lowlands more deadly than
Siberia’s steppes; not so long ago that the English Parliament passed
an act requiring all railway-trains to be preceded by a man carrying
a red flag. Like the seignorial rights of Germany’s feudal states,
anachronisms become outgrown, and fall away.
In Russia, unfortunately, the onslaught against iniquitous human laws
is overcarried into a blind charge against Nature’s laws, which no
revolution can repeal. The protest against dire artificial abuses is
mixed with a rebellion against the curse of Adam. It is the fearful
fact of life that the destiny of the majority is anxiety, dependence
for daily bread on other men, grinding incessant toil remunerated by
a bare livelihood, a barring-back from the fullest personal capacity
and possibilities through poverty, parentage, environment, and lack of
opportunity. The forces of Nature and primal competition put so many
limitations upon every one’s action that it is hard to say which are
due to the tyranny of men, which are the handicaps born of the nature
of things. The cry for deliverance is rising equally in the workhouses
of Scotland, in France, where thirty-five per cent of the land is
owned by great proprietors, in the slums of New York City, and in the
rice-fields of Japan. A government under the present system can but do
its best to develop men’s capacities, and to give them a fair deal. All
that the best of modern societies has succeeded yet in securing to the
mass of mankind is the chance to get their sons the education which
will enable them to vanquish some of the limitations, security for the
person, and protection from robbery of the cruder sort.
Capacity and opportunity can come but by slow degrees. When one sees
the numbers and the types in the villages, men of latent capacities
undoubtedly, but swamped by the spirit of _nietchevo_ and with all
their enterprise sapped in the stagnant communism of the Mir, he
realizes the futility of a sudden change and the hopelessness of
germinating by political pellet the leaven of progress in the hundred
and forty millions.
Rulers may be changed by revolution. But the real quickening of the
people to their great future must come and is coming by the slow, sure
way of evolution.
VIII
THE STORY OF THE HORDES
Among people so peaceful and subdued as are the latter-day Mongols,
it is hard to realize that the race has had a past which in tradition
at least goes back to the infancy of history. According to legend,
the Chinese, the first reputed offspring of the Mongols, preceded by
three hundred years Egypt’s earliest dynasty. They antedate Abraham’s
assigned epoch by twenty-six generations. They claim to have continued
before Marathon a longer time than has elapsed from the foundation of
Rome to our own era. Yet they yield not even to the Romans preëminence
of arms, for they won and ruled an empire in extent and population the
greatest that has ever existed. Mongols have led the world’s mightiest
armies; their hosts have carried the ox-hide banners over every great
European state but Spain and England, and into every Asian country
except Japan.
That the march of Mongols down the long way of history has been so
little appreciated is the sword’s obeisance to the pen. Save for the
mendacious memoirs of Tamerlane, and a few Ouighour inscriptions in
Central Asia, chronicles there are virtually none. So story has found a
peg for the clipped tails of Alcibiades’ dogs, but scarcely a word for
the deeds of those who won the world from the Yellow Sea to the Baltic,
from the Persian Gulf to the Arctic. Only where the annals of the race
have been written in the blood of the peoples they conquered are the
events to be traced; only by assembling the alien and hostile evidences
of the encircling nations can one shape the outline of Mongolia’s
mighty past. History takes from the Confucian Book of Records the story
of the earliest emigration to the east; from Herodotus the descent upon
Mesopotamia and the struggle with Persia on the west. It gleans from
the Chinese archives the doings of the Hiung-nu--the Huns; from the
documents of the Byzantine Empire the descent on Europe of the same
Mongolian “Scourge of God.” It culls from Arab historiographs the facts
of the southern conquests of Genghis Khan; from Russian monasteries the
tale of the northward march of his lieutenant Batui.
The outlines of Mongolia’s career are patched and gathered from her
frontier lands, yet silhouetted against the far recesses of time they
grow steadily clearer and more colossal.
In the year given by most as 2852 B.C., a tribe, whose earliest
folk-lore and traditions point to an origin in the cradle of the Hordes
near Urga, was pushing seaward down the valley of the Yellow River.
Like the children of Israel, they were in constant conflict with the
“barbarian” aborigines. This tribe became in due time the Chinese
nation.
Through fifteen hundred years the descendants of the invaders wrought
out a dimly comprehended civilization on the banks of the Hoang-ho.
Behind the imposing national legend, hallowed by the mist of centuries
and focused by images of their five Hero Kings, one may see the fact
of strong, brave rulers striving for their people’s advance. A real
statesman was the original of the demigod Shinnung, “holy husbandman,”
the introducer of agriculture, in whose honor every spring a furrow is
ploughed in the soil of his temple courtyard by the Emperor of China.
A father in the flesh was that “Nest-builder” who watched the birds
construct their homes, and on that model taught his people to make
the wattled and plastered huts one sees to-day. The mystic queller of
disastrous inundations, Ta-yu, founder of the house of Hia, was the
first hydraulic engineer, the dykes of whose successors embank the
treacherous Yellow River. He it was who hung at his door a bell which
any of his subjects might ring, to obtain immediate attention, and who
would leave his rice to answer a call to secure justice. Kie likewise
wears human lineaments, he who made a mountain of meat and a tank of
wine, and then, to please a frail companion, had his courtiers eat and
drink of them on all fours like cows. There is an historic background
to the rising against the tyrant under Shang, who later offered himself
as a human sacrifice for rain in time of famine, and a kindred note in
the story of Chou-siu, sold to misfortunes by a woman whom he loved
and immolating himself in his royal robes when the rebellious vassals
were closing in around him.