The day after the decree that placed him in the post of Prime Minister, he began to seek support where Mr. Bulygin encountered nothing but resistance and enmity—that is, he began to seek an alliance with the Moscow constitutionalists. Messrs. Lvov, Kokoshkin and A. Golovin, summoned for consultation, were the first passengers to take advantage of the resumption of traffic on the Nikolaev Railway in order to travel to St. Petersburg. Mr. Shipov is offered a portfolio. Mr. Struve... leaves Paris...

... The intensified advances made to the radical party were at first received with scepticism...

... The concessions openly made to the constitutionalists, the guarantees granted to them—all this does not diminish their hostile mood, yet it weakens their opposition. The majority of them, including Mr. Struve, are opponents of the collaboration which the socialist leaders managed to impose upon them adroitly at the beginning of the crisis and which they propose to continue also in the future. They draw a sharp line between the sphere of their reformist activity and the sphere of workers' demands; their political honesty compels them to beware of any misunderstanding that might lead to their being pushed off the stage by restless actors, always ready to pass over to drama and reconciled in advance to a bloody denouement. These pure constitutionalists, in general political terms and on the question of the distribution of general rights, place the Russian worker on the same level as the peasant. After the attainment of all these rights—and we are on the eve of this—their next task will be the solution not of the social question, but of the agrarian question, which confronts them thanks to the numerical preponderance of 80 million wretched peasants over 5 million discontented workers. This programme, in a slightly softened form, or rather divided into several parts for gradual implementation, may apparently become the programme of Count Witte as well.

The future will show whether the zemstvos will for their part agree to a friendly settlement and whether they will accept the political patronage so warmly offered to their leaders by the Chairman of the Council. There is no doubt that the awakening of reactionary forces and the sharp clashes between the bands of Reds and Blacks that occurred on November 1 here, in Moscow, Kiev and many other places, will serve as a useful warning for too hasty reformers. One cannot in a single day accustom to a constitution a people to whom all freedoms have been alien for so long; one cannot tear the popular masses away from the autocrat, a people that has never had any other political credo except love for its monarch. All these are truths obvious to an outside observer, but often forgotten in the heat of struggle by the actors themselves, and are now proven anew by the people, who resist all the blessings of the constitution. Perhaps the oppositionists, whom this people calls to order and who now stand face to face with these elementary truths, will grant Count Witte the respite he needs in order to create around himself a concentration of opinions and, under the shelter of the national flag, to occupy the golden mean between the dynastic standard and the red banner.

(End of correspondence.)