[29] The freedom manifesto of October 30, 1905, begins with the words: "We lay upon Our Government the duty of executing Our inflexible will by giving to the people the foundations of civil liberty in the form of real inviolability of personal rights, freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, freedom of public assembly, and freedom of organized association."
[30] Stenographic report of the proceedings of the first Russian Duma, St. Petersburg, July 17, 1906. A large part of the Russian Empire has been under martial law ever since the assassination of Alexander II. In 1906 it was in force in sixty-four of the eighty-seven Russian provinces.
[31] Upon the shoulders of the peasants the whole framework of the Russian state rests. When the latest census was taken, in 1897, the peasants numbered 97,000,000 in a total population of 126,000,000. Since that time the population has increased to 141,000,000, and the relative proportion of peasants to other classes has grown larger rather than smaller. (Report of the Russian Statistical Department. St. Petersburg, August, 1905.)
[32] It is this part of the population that begins to suffer from lack of food when, for any reason, there is complete or partial failure of the crops. Twenty million people, in twenty-two provinces, were reduced to absolute starvation by the famine of 1906, and were kept alive only by governmental relief on a colossal scale. Famine is predicted again this year in the provinces of Kaluga, Tula, Tambof, Samara, Saratof, Viatka, Poltava, and Chernigof. In the province last named the peasants were already mixing weeds with their rye flour in November, 1907. (Nasha Zhizn, St. Petersburg, May 23. 1906; Russian Thought, St. Petersburg, December, 1907, p. 217.)
[33] Report of the Zemstvo Committee on Agricultural Needs in the District of Voronezh, Stuttgart, 1903. This report was published in pamphlet form abroad, because the censor would not allow it to be printed in Russia.
[34] Report of the Zemstvo Committee on Agricultural Needs in the District of Voronezh, pp. 33, 34, Stuttgart, 1903.
[35] Russian Thought, St. Petersburg. June, 1907, p. 169.
[36] Russian Thought, St. Petersburg, June, 1907, p. 124.
[37] Report of the Russian Statistical Department, 1905; and Report to the Council of Ministers on the state of schools, Strana, St. Petersburg, August 23, 1906.
[38] Strana, edited by Professor Maxim Kovalefski, St. Petersburg, October 7 and 10, 1906.