n the china-shop. As a masterful
person, brusque in manner and incapable of brooking contradiction,
he had made for himself many enemies; and his restless, irrepressible
energy had led him to encroach on the provinces of all his colleagues.
Possessing as he did the control of the purse, his interference could
not easily be resisted. The Ministers of Interior, War, Agriculture,
Public Works, Public Instruction, and Foreign Affairs had all occasion
to complain of his incursions into their departments. In contrast to his
colleagues, he was not only extremely energetic, but he was ever
ready to assume an astounding amount of responsibility; and as he was
something of an opportunist, he was perhaps not always quixotically
scrupulous in the choice of expedients for attaining his ends.

Altogether M. Witte was an inconvenient personage in an administration
in which strong personality is regarded as entirely out of place, and in
which personal initiative is supposed to reside exclusively in the Tsar.
In addition to all this he was a man who felt keenly, and when he was
irritated he did not always keep the unruly member under strict
control. If I am correctly informed, it was some imprudent and not very
respectful remarks, repeated by a subordinate and transmitted by a Grand
Duke to the Tsar, which were the immediate cause of his transfer from
the influential post of Minister of Finance to the ornamental position
of President of the Council of Ministers; but that was merely the
proverbial last straw that broke the camel's back. His position was
already undermined, and it is the undermining process which I wish to
describe.

The first to work for his overthrow were the Agrarian Conservatives.
They could not deny that, from the purely fiscal point of view, his
administration was a marvellous success; for he was rapidly doubling the
revenue, and he had succeeded in replacing the fluctuating depreciated
paper currency by a gold coinage; but they maintained that he was
killing the goose that laid the golden eggs. Evidently the tax-paying
power of the rural classes was being overstrained, for they were falling
more and more into arrears in the payment of their taxes, and their
impoverishment was yearly increasing. All their reserves had been
exhausted, as was shown by the famines of 1891-92, when the Government
had to spend hundreds of millions to feed them. Whilst the land was
losing its fertility, those who had to live by it were i