Serious rioting took place in St. Petersburg last Sunday afternoon.
According to the official reports issued the same night, the demonstrators were mainly students of both sexes belonging to the high schools of the capital, who shouted and sang and displayed ten red flags bearing inscriptions hostile to the Government. The rioting, which lasted for a couple of hours, was suppressed by the police and gendarmes, who were obliged by the violence of the demonstrators to draw their swords, but only used the flat of the weapons. Forty-two cases of minor wounds are reported, but no deaths or serious injuries occurred. The correspondent of the Paris Journal, however, asserts that the police struck recklessly at all those who wore students' costumes. In all one hundred and eighty persons were arrested, of whom a hundred and twenty were students, but only nine were detained in custody. In some quarters the rioting is ascribed, and not without good grounds, to an anti-war feeling, but the real motive is evidently to be found in the growing demand for drastic political reforms. That the movement is not confined to the students is sufficiently clear from the account given by the St. Petersburg correspondent of the Aurora of a large meeting, held some ten days previously, of prominent representatives of the liberal professions. A series of reso- lutions was passed demanding, inter alia, the abolition of all restrictions founded on distinctions of class, nationality, and creed, and the immediate convoking of a Constituent Assembly to carry out the measures "necessary for the development of the national existence."
The Russian Government are not merely harassed by a" stop-the-war" movement, and turbulent demands for Con-
