ministration itself. This occult connection of sundry officials with
the leaders of the Democratic or Nihilist Conspiracy explains why
Government should so often have been hampered in its efforts to suppress
that organization.

The verdict of "not guilty," in the case of Vjera Sassulitch, has been
followed by several similar ones--a strong proof of the sympathy felt
among the town populations, at least, with the aims of the
revolutionists. Franz von Holtzendorff, a well-known legal authority in
Germany, wrote on the case above detailed:--"Far more significant than
the verdict of the jury is the fact that that verdict, in spite of its
contrast to the existing law, has received the approval, as it appears,
of the whole Russian press, of the whole of the upper classes, and even
of the circles of Russian legists. I have had personal occasion to
convince myself that prominent officials of the Russian Empire gave
their applause to that verdict." Again, Dr. Holtzendorff said:--

"In Russia, the feelings of right and justice, which are
systematically and artificially kept down and repressed, and which
have no outlet in public life, concentrate themselves with their
full weight in the verdict of a jury. That which the press had no
liberty of saying during long years, is given vent to in the
debates of a Court of Justice. An accusation is raised on account
of a deed which, though punishable as a crime in itself, has been
produced and nurtured by a system of administrative arbitrariness
and gross ill-treatment that stands morally deep below the deed in
question--a system of corruption which cannot be attacked legally,
nay, which enjoys all the honours the State can award. And who can
help it if an injustice committed day after day, in the name of the
State, without any expiation, weighs more heavily upon the public
conscience than the act of a single person who, boldly risking his
or her own life, rises with a feeling of the deepest indignation
against so rotten a system of Government? It is but too natural,
this wrathful utterance of the popular voice, when it declares that
a high official, who, trusting in the practical approval of the
Imperial favour, ordains corporal punishment according to his
arbitrary caprice against defenceless prisoners, is guilty of a
greater offence than he who feels driven, by a passionate notion of