workers
known to history. He had but one source of inspiration, religious zeal,
and but one form of relaxation, the love of his devoted Empress.

It is needless to refer to the later phases of the revolutionary
movement. Despite their well-laid plans, the revolutionaries gradually
lost ground; and in 1892 even Stepniak confessed that they alone could
not hope to overthrow the autocracy. About that time, too, their party
began to split in twain, a younger group claiming that the old terrorist
methods must be replaced by economic propaganda of an advanced
socialistic type among the workers of the towns. For this new departure
and its results we must refer our readers to the new materials brought
to light by Sir D. Mackenzie Wallace in the new edition of his work
_Russia_ (1905).

Here we can point out only a few of the more general causes that
contributed to the triumph of the Czar. In the first place, the
difficulties in the way of common action among the proletariat of Russia
are very great. Millions of peasants, scattered over vast plains, where
the great struggle is ever against the forces of nature, cannot
effectively combine. Students of history will observe that even where
the grievances are mainly agrarian, as in the France of 1789, the first
definite outbreak is wont to occur in great towns. Russia has no Paris,
eager to voice the needs of the many.

Then again, the Russian peasants are rooted in customs and superstitions
which cling about the Czar with strange tenacity and are proof against
the reasoning of strangers. Their rising could, therefore, be very
partial; besides which, the land is for the most part unsuited to the
guerilla tactics that so often have favoured the cause of liberty in
mountainous lands. The Czar and his officials know that the strength of
their system lies in the ignorance of the peasants, in the soldierly
instincts of their immense army, and in the spread of railways and
telegraphs, which enables the central power to crush the beginnings of
revolt. Thus the Czar's authority, resting incongruously on a faith dumb
and grovelling as that of the Dark Ages, and on the latest developments
of mechanical science, has been able to defy the tendencies of the age
and the strivings of Russian reformers.

* * * * *

The aim of this work prescribes a survey of those events alone which
have made modern States what they are to-day; but the victory of
absolutism in R