dingly drawn up and signed on November 21st by 102
out of the 104 representatives present.

This hesitating attitude on the part of the Government encouraged
other sections of the educated classes to give expression to their long
pent-up political aspirations. On the heels of the Zemstvo delegates
appeared the barristers, who discussed the existing evils from the
juridical point of view, and prescribed what they considered the
necessary remedies. Then came municipalities of the large towns,
corporations of various kinds, academic leagues, medical faculties,
learned societies, and miscellaneous gatherings, all demanding reforms.
Great banquets were organised, and very strong speeches, which would
have led in Plehve's time to the immediate arrest of the orators, were
delivered and published without provoking police intervention.

In the memorandum presented to the Minister of the Interior by the
Zemstvo Congress, and in the resolutions passed by the other corporate
bodies, we see reflected the grievances and aspirations of the great
majority of the educated classes.

The theory propounded in these documents is that a lawless, arbitrary
bureaucracy, which seeks to exclude the people from all participation
in the management of public affairs, has come between the nation and
the Supreme Power, and that it is necessary to eliminate at once this
baneful intermediary and inaugurate the so-called "reign of law." For
this purpose the petitioners and orators demanded:

(1) Inviolability of person and domicile, so that no one should be
troubled by the police without a warrant from an independent magistrate,
and no one punished without a regular trial;

(2) Freedom of conscience, of speech, and of the Press, together with
the right of holding public meetings and forming associations;

(3) Greater freedom and increased activity of the local self-government,
rural and municipal;

(4) An assembly of freely elected representatives, who should
participate in the legislative activity and control the administration
in all its branches;

(5) The immediate convocation of a constituent assembly, which should
frame a Constitution on these lines.

Of these requirements the last two are considered by far the most
important. The truth is that the educated classes have come to be
possessed of an ardent desire for genuine parliamentary institutions on
a broad, democratic basis, and neither improvements in the bureaucratic
organisation, n