LONDON.

Poverty Bay Standard, Volume IX, Issue 963, 23 July 1881, Page 2 (Supplement)

LONDON.

(from a correspondent.) May 19, 1881. The long and anxious debate of the Emperor Alexander 111 aud his councillors has ended in a vetory for the party of reaction. Only so lately as the 10th inst., it seemed as if the new reign were to be inaugurated by some approach at least to a constitutional system of government. Loris Melikoff was still the trusted adviser, to all appearance, of the Czar, and under his auspices a measnre was believed to be on the point of receiving the Emperor’s signature, which would have the effect of consummating the act of emancipation by giving the peasantry a property in the soil on easier terms than were provided by the Act. On the following day the Emperor issued forth for the first time from his seclusion in the palace of Gatehina, accompanied by the Empress, and held ar** review of between 30,000 and 40,000 troops. Having then given evidence, as it were, of the irresistible power which he commands, he caused a proclamation to be issued in which he announced his resolution to maintain intact the autocracy which he had inherited from his forefathers. He declares that it is a system which he has full faith in, and which he is, determined to uphold'; and he calls upon all loyal subjects to rally ronnd their Czar and aid him to extirpate the pest of revolution which is covering Russia with shame. The Imperial manifesto came upon St. Petersburg with the shock and surprise of an explosion. Nothing was less expected by the general public. It had become a matter of such confident expectation that a constitution of some kind would follow speedily on the accession of the new Emperor, that already the.details of the new system were being discussed, when the Czar announced it as his absolute will that there should Constitution at all. Having thus settled the question the Emperor retired again to his palace, where he w andtheyoung Empress live surrounded ’ by German and Danish guards and attendants, only allowing themselves to be approached by persons whose business can be most clearly and satisfactorily explained. Some excuse for this caution and reserve may be pleaded in the effect which the savage threats of the Nihilists have produced upon the Empress. They have attacked her in her weakest point by threatening that her children shall suffer for the execution of the female conspirator, Sophie Petroffskaya ; aud they have shaken the Czar by unnerving the Czarina. His reaction must be attributed to his dread of the consequences of giving way to demands expressed in such menacing terms. The immediate result of this Imperial manifesto was that Count Loris Melikoff sent in his resignation of the office which he was holding, that of Minister of the Interior. The Em- j peror was unwilling to receive it, and J requested him to come to the palace 1 and confer with him. Loris Melikoff, I who had been really made ill by the sudden shock to all his hopes Amd plans, made that his excuse for declining to wait upon the Czar, and persisted in leaving his resignation un- i cancelled. He was followed in the course he had taken by Abaza, the 1

Minister of Finance, by De Giers, the acting Minister for Foreign Affairs, by Nicolai, and by General Milutin’ The whole Cabinet, in short, placed placed their resignations in the hands of the Emperor, being altogether opposed to the policy of reaction upon which their master seemed to be determined. The Emperor was annoyed, but unshaken in his resolve, and General Ignatieff has been appointed to succeed Melikoff, and will form a Cabinet in accordance with his ideas. There are those who trace in all this the hand of the arch-plotter Prince Bismarck, and who wonder that Ignatieff, with his well-known anti-German tendencies, should be selected to carry into effect a policy which owes its origin to a German source. More probably the fact of such a selection may be takeu as evidence that the policy does not originate with Prince Bismarck. He contents himself generally with letting other folk originate and contrive, while he moulds their plans to his own ends. There is quite enough in the present condition of Russia to lead a man of impetuous and undisciplined nature like Alexander 111, to the conviction that the safety of the Empire is to be found in the close union of the Czar and the masses of the people. The ideas of the political reformers are too visionary to be of much political service in the re-organisation of the Empire. The Russian mind seems to be so constituted that it runs at once into extremes. Nihilism is only one phase of a discontent with things as they are, which pervades almost all educated classes in Russia, but out of which no tangible plans of reform develop themselves. The leading principle seems to be the Socialist one of demolishing what exists, because it exists rather than because it is not capable of improvement. Only the other day the Grand Duke Nicolas Constantinovitch, the son of the brother of the late Czar, and the cousin of the present, was arrested and confined in the castle of Dunaburg, on account of his wild revolutionary ideas. (To be Continued.)