THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. SATURDAY, MAY 25, 1907. RUSSIAN TROUBLES.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXX, Issue 8448, 25 May 1907, Page 4

THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. SATURDAY, MAY 25, 1907. RUSSIAN TROUBLES.

Russia .is still shut out from the civilised world by the systematic suppression of news which has been reduced to a fine art by the bureaucracy. But the scraps of information communicated to correspondents of the Western press by the authorities, or secured by eluding the vigilance of officials, all corroborate the general impression that anarchy has become chronic. An extensive plot to assassinate or capture the Czar is. reported as having been frustrated, and the Duma is said to have passed a congratulatory resolution. But although there seems every reason for the existence o* regicidal conspirators, the Russian police are notable manufacturers of evidence and have not infrequently managed to discover plots that had no actual existence in order to afford justification for extreme action. The purging of the Duma as a sequence to the official refusal to re-admit into the country the Reformers who have attended the Russian meeting in London may follow this police discovery, and will explain its character. Whether the Duma is reduced to an expurgated and submissive body or not can hardly make much difference to the political situation, for it has never been an effective Parliament, and at the most has only given expression to the almost universal discontent. Revolutionary robberies and assassinations, with official and semiofficial attacks upon usually innocent people form the burden of Russian news. If the Russian wheat crop is a failure, as American speculators arejjvidently convinced, the agrarian agitation must inevitably increase.

Yet with all this there is no further sign of the collapse of the autocracy, which is surviving disorders that would long ago have overturned any other Government in Europe. None would have prophesied, two years ago, that the Russian Government would now be unchanged and unreformed; and it is quite possible that existing conditions may so suit the Russian temperament that they will continue unaltered for an indefinite period.