The Bismarck tribune. [volume] (Bismarck, N.D.) 1916-current, 1917-10-22
BY CHARLES EDWARD RUSSELL,
Who Spent Three Months in Rus.
STA as Member Of the Official

STA as a Member of the Official
American Commission.
The more a thinking person sees or
democracy, the more he wants to take
off his hat to it.
1t doesn't seem, as you look at it
carefully, to be so much a kind OF
creed that men have knocked togeth-
er, as an eternal law Of progress that
goes on and goes on always, no mat
ter what men may think of it.
Sometimes when it seems to be de-
feated it is winning victory. I'm
less in this war it is to be stamped
out forever under the Prussian boot,
you can feel pretty sure it will con-
tinue to move on until it gets the
whole world.
There is in the winter palace at
Petrograd a certain room intimately
connected with one chapter OF the
long struggle, and supposed on other
grounds to be the most interesting
room in the palace, although it isn't.
They show you the great, gorgeous
ball rooms and the marble staircase
and the thrones and the royal suites
and the riot Of extravaganza, and
then they show you the rooms that
figure most in the story of Car Alex
ander II, his council chamber and the
room in which he died.
The council chamber has still the
long table around which his ministers
used to sit, the chair for each, the
portfolio with the name of each
stamped upon it, the great chair at
the head for the car.
These you are expected to view
with awe. l don't know why.
They then exhibit the bed room,
the plain camp bed that he always
preferred to any other, the stub OF
the last cigaret he smoked, the keys
and penknife taken from his pockets,
and other relics, supposed greatly to
move the visitor.
Perhaps they do, but II he is phil
osopher they certainly don't move
him in the way that was expected in
the old days.
Alexander II is called by his ad-
mirers, and particularly by English
writer's, liberal monarch"
The name is an error. There are
no liberal monarchs" and never were
any. There are no good kings and
cannot possibly be.
Some, of course, are worse than
others But if king exercises any
authority he is taking something that
doesn't belong to him. And if he
doesn't exercise any authority he is
notion the level; he is taking the tax
payers money on false pretense.
How therefore, can he be good?
AS for Russia, a car always went
ahead with the hideous old machine
Tor sending men and women into the
living death of Siberia. He always
supported the mOnstrous system of
tyranny and espionage He always
Knew that under his rule men and
women were being beaten with knouts,
burned and mutilated be-
:ause they believed in human liberty
+ he were good or "liberal' he would
IT sit for a moment on throne
lrenched with human blood and sup
'orted by force and fraud.
Men said Alexander II was Glib
raj" monarch, principally because he
igaed the ukase that abolished serf-
om in Russia. This, of course, was
vast improvement, and the fact that
erfdom was strangling Russia's de-
'elopment takes nothing away from
he glory of the emancipation. But
he same car enforced a system far
worse than slavery in his brutal and |
uthless suppression of free speech, a
rec press and every other right that
reemen hold dear.
Slavery was abolished in Russia in
Sci Twenty years later Alexander
|, greatly alarmed at the rapid in
rease of the secret revolutionary
in his empire, consulted
nth his secretary of the interior as
0 the best meaus of stopping it.
The secretary told him that the
est way was to grant speciOus re-
orms and give to Russia the form OF
constitutional monarchy, with a par
lament that should be more or less Of
fake, but still could be called par
ament.
The car thought we'll of this
cheme, and told the secretary to 60
head and put his plan on paper. The
drew up plan by which the
of the empire and some 9TH
r bodies were to send delegates to a