conscious public life of
the state, as a healthy, conservative principle of government,
has always entered into the plans of the sovereign leaders of the life
of Russia as a state. These intentions were announced afresh from the
throne by the manifesto of February 26, 1903. In our country this
process takes place in accordance with the historical basis of the
empire, with the national peculiarities of its population.

The result is that in Russia we have the organization of local
institutions which give self-government in the narrow sense of the
word--_i.e.,_ the right of the people to see to the satisfaction of
their local economic needs. In Finland the idea of local autonomy was
developed far earlier and in a far wider manner. Its present scope,
which has grown and developed under Russian rule, embraces all sides,
not only of the economic, but of the civil, life of the land. Russian
autocracy has thus given irrefragable proof of its constructive powers
in the sphere of civic development. The historian of the future will
have to note its ethical importance in a far wider sphere as well: the
greatest of social problems have found a peaceable solution in Russia,
thanks to the conditions of its political organization.

For a full comprehension, however, of the manifesto of 1899, it must be
regarded as one of the phases in the development of Finland's relations
to Russia. It will then become evident that as a legacy of the past it
is the outcome of the natural course of events which sooner or later
must have led up to it. The initiation of Finland into the historical
destinies of the Russian Empire was bound to lead to the rise of
questions calling for a general solution common both to the empire and
to Finland. Naturally, in view of the subordinate status of the latter,
such questions could be solved only in the order appointed for imperial
legislation. At the same time, neither the fundamental laws of the
Swedish period of rule in Finland, which were completely incompatible
with its new status, nor the Statutes of the Diet, introduced by
Alexander II., and determining the order of issue of local laws,
touched, or could touch, the question of the issue of general imperial
laws. This question arose in the course of the legislative work
on the systematization of the fundamental laws of Finland. This task,
undertaken by order of the Emperor Alexander II. for the more precise
determination of the status of Finland as an ind