↑ In 1897 only 15% of the population were engaged in commerce or industry, including the work-people. Of the middle class, moreover, a large proportion were Jews and Germans. The peasants numbered 75%.
↑ “Tolstoi observed that that was argument and reason, and that he paid no attention to them; he only guided himself (he said) by sentiment, which he felt sure told him what was good and right!”—Interview with Metchnikoff in Sir Ray Lankester's Science from an Easy Chair , p. 43.
↑ In 1767, when Catherine II.—in a mood of encyclopaedist enlightenment—summoned it. The meeting confined its attention to economic questions, and had no political character whatever.
↑ In his speech at the opening of the first Polish parliament at Warsaw in 1818, Alexander I. publicly announced his intention of granting free institutions to Russia.
↑ Sazonov's sentence of twenty years' hard labour was commuted by Nicholas II. to fourteen years.
↑ Duma = council, assembly ( dumat , to think over, reflect upon). The name was first suggested by Speranski, under Alexander I., for the suggested parliament of delegates from the zemstvos and local dumas .
↑ Pogrom = pillage, destruction.
↑ See the section Government and Administration , above.
↑ Of this M. Chasles remarks that it would have been a revolutionary act even in republican France.
↑ They were condemned in 1907 to three months' imprisonment and loss of civil rights.
↑ This was reversed, on the 8th of June, by 238 votes to 191, after a patient exposition by M. Stolypin of the fact that there was plenty of land in Russia for the peasants without any attack on private property.
↑ The electoral law covers 107 octavo pages.
↑ See above, Government and Administration .
↑ The law establishing individual peasant-proprietorship was passed on December 21st.