are surely well worth the attention of the Western nations.

Mr Pobyedonostseff is the critic in the stalls. To him, as to all of us Russians, the parliamentary theatre of the Western world performs a long tragicomedy, which occasionally ascends to tragedy and sometimes sinks into farce. We can observe it dispassionately, critically, and sometimes even sympathetically.

However you may deplore the fact, we are outside of it, and have never shown less disposition than to-day to enrol ourselves in the Democratic troupe.

Even Count Leon Tolstoi, who may, perhaps, be regarded as the most extreme and privileged critic in Russia, treats Constitutionalism with the same supercilious contempt as all the other forms of government.

We have no parliamentary party in Russia. No one, even in the abstract, as a matter of theory, would wish to inoculate the Muscovite politician with the passion of parliamentary faction; hence the observations of Mr Pobyedonostseff have an independence and a detachment from things impossible to those who are themselves in the movement, and who have to consider in all they write and speak the effect which their action may have upon their own future relations to the multitude.

It is not for me to follow every step of the Procurator of the Holy Synod over the wide field which he traverses with such a steady tread. My task is done when, in these few words, I introduce his book to the attention of English readers.

But I cannot resist the temptation of noting especially the prescient words of Mr Pobyedonostseff as to the impossibility of reconciling the pretensions of Nationality and Democracy. The recent developments in Austria have signally justified the grave warnings of the Russian publicist, which were written years before the conflict of national passions which has made parliamentary government impossible in the Cis-Leithan State.

In conclusion, I may remind those who protest against giving a hearing to an advocate of autocracy, that Her Most Gracious Majesty Queen Victoria, even in the sixty-first year of her reign, has not deemed it expedient, or even possible, to govern more than a mere fraction of her subjects on Democratic principles. The government of threefourths of the British Empire is as autocratic and as free from the chinoiseries of representative government as the government of Russia itself.

OLGA NOVIKOFF.

April 1898.

("O. K.")