condemned for high treason, being sent to prison and to Siberia. New laws
and regulations restricting the press were proclaimed and enforced with
increasing severity. By comparison with the next two years, the period from
1905 to 1907 was a period of freedom. After the election of the Third Duma
the bureaucracy grew ever bolder. Books and leaflets which had been
circulated openly and with perfect freedom during 1905 and 1906 were
forbidden, and, moreover, their authors were arrested and sentenced to long
terms of imprisonment. While the law still granted freedom of assemblage
and the right to organize meetings, these rights did not exist as
realities. Everywhere the Black Hundreds held sway, patronized by the Czar,
who wore their emblem and refused to permit the punishment of any of their
members, even though they might be found guilty by the courts.

It is not necessary to dwell upon the work of the Third Duma. This is not a
history of Russia, and a detailed study of the servile parliament of
Nicholas II and Stolypin would take us too far afield from our special
study--the revolutionary movement. Suffice it, therefore, to say that some
very useful legislation, necessary to the economic development of Russia,
was enacted, and that, despite the overwhelming preponderance of
reactionaries, it was not an absolutely docile body. On several occasions
the Third Duma exercised the right of criticism quite vigorously, and on
two or three occasions acted in more or less open defiance of the wishes of
the government. A notable instance of this was the legislation of 1909,
considerably extending freedom of religious organization and worship, which
was, however, greatly curtailed later by the Imperial Council--and then
nullified by the government.

The period 1906-14 was full of despair for sensitive and aspiring souls.
The steady and rapid rise in the suicide-rate bore grim and eloquent
testimony to the character of those years of dark repression. The number of
suicides in St. Petersburg increased during the period 1905-08 more than
400 per cent.; in Moscow about 800 per cent.! In the latter city two-fifths
of the suicides in 1908 were of persons less than twenty years old! And
yet, withal, there was room for hope, the soul of progress was not dead. In
various directions there was a hopeful and promising growth. First among
these hopeful and promising facts was the marvelous growth of the
Consumers' Co-operatives. After 1905 bega