nistrative
abilities of a high order. Enjoying in a peculiar degree the confidence
of Alexander II., he was charged with the supervision of all political
trials and a virtual control of all the Governors-General of the Empire.
Thereupon the central committee of the Nihilists proclaimed war _a
outrance_ until the Czar conceded to a popularly elected National
Assembly the right to reform the life of Russia.

Here was the strength of the Nihilist party. By violent means it sought
to extort what a large proportion of the townsfolk wished for and found
no means of demanding in a lawful manner. Loris Melikoff, gifted with
the shrewdness of his race, saw that the Government would effect little
by terrorism alone. Wholesale arrests, banishment, and hangings only
added to the number of the disaffected, especially as the condemned went
to their doom with a calm heroism that inspired the desire of imitation
or revenge. Repression must clearly be accompanied by reforms that would
bridge over the gulf ever widening between the Government and the
thinking classes of the people. He began by persuading the Emperor to
release several hundreds of suspects and to relax the severe measures
adopted against the students of the Universities. Lastly, he sought to
induce the Czar to establish representative institutions, for which even
the nobles were beginning to petition. Little by little he familiarised
him with the plan of extending the system of the Zemstvos, so that there
should be elective councils for towns and provinces, as well as
delegations from the provincial _noblesse_. He did not propose to
democratise the central Government. In his scheme the deputies of
nobles and representatives of provinces and towns were to send delegates
to the Council of State, a purely consultative body which Alexander I.
had founded in 1802.

Despite the tentative nature of these proposals, and the favourable
reception accorded to them by the Council of State, the Czar for several
days withheld his assent. On March 9 he signed the ukase, only to
postpone its publication until March 12. Not until the morning of March
13 did he give the final order for its publication in the _Messager
Officiel_. It was his last act as lawgiver. On that day (March 1, and
Sunday, in the Russian calendar) he went to the usual military parade,
despite the earnest warnings of the Czarevitch and Loris Melikoff as to
a rumoured Nihilist plot. To their pleadings he returned the a