6 JULY 1907, Page 23

A WARNING OF HISTORY.

[TO TRH EDITOR OP THR sescrAroic...] Sin,—One of the most signal warnings of history seems to have been disregarded by the Russian Government. In France, on the eve of the Revolution, the case, including the financial part of it, was far from desperate, and might have been successfully met if the King had called round him his best advisers and with their guidance used his power, which was sovereign, in the inauguration of practical reforms. Instead of that, he summoned an elective Assembly sure to contain all the revolutionary elements, and, instead of co- operating with him in a policy of reform, to wrestle with him for supreme power. Wrestle with him for supreme power it did, and, his Army having failed him, with fatal success, as Europe feels at this hour. The Czar in granting the Duma made the same mistake which had been made by Louis, and as a matter of course the Duma, like the National Assembly, instead of co-operating in practical reform, commenced a struggle for supreme power. Luckily for the Czar, his Cossacks have proved more loyal than the Gardes-Francaises, and Russia has been so far saved from a Republic of Dynamite. Few can think that she is at present fit in any respect for democratic institutions. A crash would not be limited to Russia. The world is far more electrical than it was a century ago. A dynamiter butchering not only his political enemies, but numbers of unoffending people, with his cowardly missile is surely an enemy, not of the Czar's Government, but of the