W E are not disposed, as some of our contemporaries are,
to worship Count Witte. He is obviously a self-seeking man, and a vain one, and we cannot rid our- selves of the idea that in his spasm of boastfulness after he bad secured the Treaty of Peace with Japan he allowed his vanity to obscure his sense of duty. The trickeries by which he carried his points may have been within those limits of adroitness which are recognised by diplomatists as fair, but he shoed have been silent about them, and not by talking so loudly have placed all Japanese Envoys in future permanently on guard. Nevertheless, it is not easy to watch Count Witte's struggles without a sensation of deep pity for his position. It is so nearly an impossible one. He wants, we imagine, to carry through a revolution without encouraging a popular rising, and, without sacrificing the Monarchy, to transmute the old autocracy into a modern kingship, and he has no force behind him with which to do it. He has not the force within himself, as three at least of the French revolutionaries had, or the smashing power of Peter I., the only ruffian of genius recorded in modern history- Sulla was another in the earlier time—and his external force is hopelessly inadequate. Onlookers blame him for not doing this or that, and forget that his power is based on nothing but the favour of his Sovereign. Before he can do anything be must convince a reflective gentleman with a feeble will who is swayed by ideas which are not his and by people who are his enemies, who at heart dislikes him as probably not devoted and certainly plebeian, and who only uses him because there is no one else. He has not the support of the officials—as, for example, the German Emperor has—for the immense machine which throughout the Empire governs all Russians in the name of the Czar sees clearly that if Count Witte succeeds its own exemption from the re- strictions of law cannot last six months. He is doubtful of the Army, and even if he trusted it, could not be a military Dictator. He is distrusted by the few moderates capable of office, whose influence, again, is far less than that of the Girondins in France, and the Whigs in England. The Army of the Revolution, moreover, is not behind him. Its Radical elements desire objects which are not his, while its mob elements are thirsting for loot and license, which are indulged at the expense of the Jews, but which are to men of the Count's type utterly distasteful. There remains the grand amorphous force of Russia, which if it once moves can crush all resistance as a Nasmyth's hammer crushes eggs, —the body of the peasantry; but this Count Witte is either unwilling or unpermitted to call up. He looks on it longingly, it is true, as any Russian reformer must, and one hears from week to week of some little proposal for granting representation to the peasants ; but from a bold and clear appeal to them through universal suffrage the Count shrinks, not, as we con- ceive the situation, unnaturally. We never met an observer yet who was quite sure of any thing the peasants want except the land, or who knew, or thought he knew, whether if granted the land they would strike for the Czar. It is the custom to attribute to the peasantry unbounded loyalty to the Czar ; but the Reservists did not display it, neither soldiers nor sailors love the method of their discipline—witness the scenes in Kronstadt and Vladi- vostok—and, in any case, who knows, or can know, the secret hidden in the heart of a Demos who has suffered for hundreds of years, who has been enslaved, with liability to the lash, and who doubts, though he is free, whether in the end there is any law but force ?
The speeial harassment about which everybody has been speculating this week is but one of a _dozen which are believed to be so pressing on Count Witte that he is on the edge of an attack of nervous prostration. This is the fear entertained at St. Peters- burg of an insurrection in Poland. That insurrection has been apprehended for montlui past, but has been averted by the counsels of the Liberal nobles, who, being on the popular side, have great influence with their people, and who have satisfied themselves that the time for insurrection is inopportune, because the German Kaiser might, if it occurred, occupy Warsaw in irresistible strength. His agents would govern steadily, and perhaps without needless oppression ; but the nobles are afraid that he might govern permanently, and, as between the two Powers, they prefer the Slav one. They dislike Pro- testantism more than the Greek Church; the Poles are, after all, Slays like the Russians ; and the searching efficiency or tyranny—call it which you will—of the German officials produces in their minds a painful sense of hope- lessness. They would therefore prefer to wait. The constant street fighting has, however, so exasperated the common people that we fancy the Czartoryskis, Sapiehas, and their kind can no longer hold the revolutionaries in, and there is real danger of a revolt intended to end in an independent Poland. This, excites the Court of St. Petersburg beyond measure, as threatening "the integrity of Russia," which is also threatened by the fears of the German Emperor that freedom in Russian Poland may produce an outburst in his own Polish provinces. Freedom always seems to absolutists as catching as measles. The Czar, therefore, has persuaded or compelled Count Witte to place all Poland under martial law, and the Poles are informed that they are "insolent," and that until they are quiet again they will be ruled by the iron hand. They will have no autonomy such as has been conceded to the Finns, and none of the liberties granted to Russians shall be enjoyed by them. The effect of this pro- clamation, made in the form of a communique, will undoubtedly be a reign of terror in Poland, or, at all events, that military dictatorship which Count Witte endeavours to avoid. The moderates have all quitted him at once, the Generals are all saying "We told you so," and the revolutionaries, who feel that they cannot abandon Poland, have already decreed another general strike. The little Duma promised in the Czar's first Manifesto is postponed ; all Russia is warned that order must precede reforms, "which can only be carried out among a tranquil population "; and Count Witte, not wholly without reason, believes that the stars in their courses are fighting against his policy. He probably does not want to crush Poland ; he certainly does not want to introduce German troops into Warsaw ; and he greatly dreads destroying the Czar's partial and intermittent confidence in himself. Yet, whatever he does, he must incur one of these great dangers, and must risk an explosion which may undo all the little success he has as yet attained. It is a horrible position, all the more so as Count Witte, as an old financier and diplomatist, personally wishes not to offend French opinion, which is sensitive about Poland to the last degree, and desires as strongly as his master that the revolution should not involve a loss of Russian provinces. We try to do justice to Count Witte, but there are sources of weakness, both in his character and his patriotism, which render him a feeble barrier against the revolution that is visibly rushing on. All the evidence available indicates that the reactionaries are pre- paring for another outburst of repression which will tax the fidelity of the soldiers to the last degree. If they refuse to act—and they have terrible grievances of their own—or if the reported risings in the famine-stricken districts should spread, only Providence can save the house of Romanoff from deposition and the world from a most dangerous upset of the European equilibrium.
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