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unknown men in its front rank. Printers were forbidden to work for them; their electoral literature had all to be written or typed, and newspapers were suppressed for daring to publish the names of their "ticket" at the primary elections. They were even refused the facility of printed ballot papers accorded to all the "legal" parties-a serious handicap in a country where a large percentage of the electors is illiterate. During the greater part of the period since the dissolution of the first Duma, they could hold no meetings, and even towards the close of the campaign, when a few meetings were tolerated, any criticism of the Government was punished by heavy fines. Some classes of electors were disfranchised in the mass, notably the railway employees; everywhere the registers were revised and "purified," and many of the more prominent Liberal leaders, like Professors Miliukoff and Kovalevsky, were disqualified on technical objections, which the Higher Courts quashed too late to allow of their adoption as candidates. The same tactics were, of course, adopted towards the Socialists. But the Socialists of all shades have been long accustomed to work as a persecuted party. They have carried the methods of conspiracy to a high pitch of perfection. Their secret presses, their anonymous committees, the reckless daring of their student allies, who look on the road to Siberia as the path to glory, and of working-men ready to exchange misery for martyrdom, enabled them to work the elections precisely as they would have worked a strike or a military mutiny. The Cadets, a party of professional men, Liberal land-owners, and middle-aged merchants, were handicapped in this competition by their very respectability. Branded as an illegal party, they none the less refused to adopt revolu

tionary methods, or to make common cause with the Socialists. Their Left wing, it is true, did in many districts form a coalition with the Social Democrats. But Professor Miliukoff made bitter speeches about "the red rag," and in Moscow and St. Petersburg Radicals and Socialists quarrelled as hotly as though they had been electioneering in Hamburg or Berlin.

The result of the elections is certainly a crushing defeat for the Government. With all its manipulation of the register, despite the aid of the police, the official parties return to the Duma a feeble minority. The Opposition, be they Polish Nationalists, Cadets, Left Coalition, doctrinaire Social Democrats with rigid German principles, Russian Social Revolutionaries, or peasant members of the Party of Toil, will be united in opposing the bureaucracy, in demanding the resignation of M. Stolypin, and in pushing forward a programme of responsible government, personal liberty, universal suffrage, and compulsory land purchase. The strategy of the Government has resulted in the return of a Duma more extreme, more violent, less homogeneous than the last. But, unhappily, it would be quite premature to say that for that reason it has failed. It may on the contrary have succeeded in creating a Duma which will give it a plausible pretext for a second dissolution, a longer period of arbitrary repression, and a more drastic manipulation of the franchise. The Cadets of the Centre will hardly be what they were a year ago, an imposing majority, entitled to form a commanding and responsible Ministry. The exclusion of nearly all the members who had gained experience in the first Duma may prove in the end as fatal to democracy as was the self-denying ordinance by which the members of the first Constituent Assembly in the French Revolution pledged themselves

to refuse re-election. Mouromtseff, Miliukoff, Vinaver, Kovalevsky, among the Liberals, Plekhanoff, Aladyn, Anaikin among the Socialists, are outside this Duma. The new members are untried men who, in most cases, escaped persecution by their obscurity alone, and evaded the political police by posing on the official lists as "moderates," "independents," or "doubtfuls." The Duma is dead; but it has suffered a transformation, and not a resurrection. Russian opinion is quite prepared for its immediate dissolution. It would be more consonant with M. Stolypin's German strategy, to play upon the feuds which divide the Liberal Centre from the Radical and Socialist Left. To legalize the Cadets after reducing their strength, to group them, in return for a few superficial concessions, with the Octobrist Conservatives, and the aristocratic Polish Nationalists against the Socialists of the Left, and then to appeal in Prince Bülow's manner to the middle-classes against the

The Nation.

revolution,

would be, from his standpoint, an intelligible, and perhaps a promising policy. Even Professor Miliukoff announces that parliamentary government is not a prominent point in the Cadet programme. But we know as yet too little either of the real spirit of the elected Cadets, or of the political wisdom of the Socialists, to predict their power of circumventing M. Stolypin's strategy. The aim of men like Professors Miliukoff and Kovalevsky, is certainly to acclimatize the spirit of English and French democracy in Russia. They are among the ablest political thinkers in Europe, and it must be as clear to them as it is to us, that a progressive party riven by internal feuds can hope at best for the fate of German Liberalism, which has allowed itself by slow stages of compromise, to become the declared enemy of the working-classes, and the tool of the bureaucracy. The real question for the Second Duma is, whether its model shall be the Reichstag or the House of Commons.

OLD-FASHIONED FLOWERS.

Suppose a man, not color-blind, nor altogether insensible to recent modes of taste, after gazing with dazzled eyes on the sort of set-piece of garden fireworks still sometimes found on terraces in front of large country houses -the stars and crescents of tagetes and lobelia and coleus ranged about a central sun compact of a thousand scarlet geraniums-suppose him suddenly transported to a mossy flagged path between borders of cottager's flowers, white lilies against the dark background of a yew bush, a damask rose leaning across a clump of lavender, pansies straggling over an edging of pinks and daisies-he would in all probability exclaim delightedly in

favor of the old-fashioned flowers. The epithet which he would almost inevitably use is one of those irrational stock phrases which have to suffice for the conveyance of much meaning in the happy-go-lucky businesses of the world. "Old-fashioned," with its detestable variant "old-world," will not stand a minute's analysis. Our latest novelties of six-inch begonias, or mopheaded chrysanthemums, even while they electrify the show-tent, are oldfashioned for those gardeners who shall call our time antique. The simpler, more modest flowers which we are pleased to invest with that halfregretful charm owe their attraction to the gaudier and bolder developments

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of our day; it is the geometrical pyrotechny on the front lawn which gives the lilies and pansies of the cottage alleys their distinction of careless and retired grace. We are arbitrary and short-sighted even in the differences which we make; we take for earliest antiques things which our fathers experimented with; there are others from which time seems unable to remove the air of novelty. Within fifty years we have seen the verbena hackneyed almost to extinction, and again beginning to appeal to a new generation as quite a pretty neglected thing, a revival of Paxtonian graces. It is difficult to imagine that any length of time will bring such things as fuchsias or petunias into the same category with violets or pansies, even with stocks or Canterbury Bells. Though "old-fashioned" be an absurd symbol, the class which it expresses is definite enough. A rigid purist would probably confine his list of the order to the older summer-flowering roses the damasks and mosses, the Provence and Gallica hybrids-the white Queen and the orange lilies, tulips, pansies, violets, wallflowers, Canterbury Bells, pinks, double daisies, hollyhocks, pæonies of the officinalis tribe, poppies, lavender, pot-marigold, flag iris, lupins, and a few whose names are part of their claim to be included-such as Sweet William, Honesty, Heartsease, None-so-pretty, or London Pride; Thrift, Love-in-a-Mist, Love-lies-bleeding. An easier critic might admit sweet peas, China asters, stocks, snapdragon, auriculas, mignonette, some of the mallows, and a few more that stand near the doubtful line. There is a good deal of significance in the names of garden-flowers; some of those given above are classical, and many of them go excellently in verse: gillyflowers and Love-in-idleness (though too many people have the vaguest notions of what they are) have

as much music in them as smell. There are others that will not grow on Parnassus: we shall never learn to scan Rudbeckia laciniata, nor Kniphofia Tucki, and the fact implies something. A careless observer of the seri studiorum, who nowadays take up gardening with such easy enthusiasm, would probably expect the chosen few to be all hardy "herbaceous" kinds, looking after themselves for half a lifetime without much care from the gardener. As a matter of fact, though with one or two exceptions all those named are quite hardy in average British winters, yet only some half-dozen are real perennials; some, with due care as to dividing and re-planting, are long-lived; some are biennial, the rest merely annual. All are robust and easy to growwith the sad exception of the white Queen lily and the hollyhock, and, in some grounds, of the tulip, which are threatened with extinction from specific diseases-but it is no part of the old flowers' nature to fend entirely for themselves and to let the gardener off from his charge; the regular practice of an art which conceals itself among the stoutly pushing stems and thickspread leaves is perhaps more needful here than anywhere else, to bring in the human element which distinguishes the garden from the

wild.

Few things would better repay intelligent gardeners who have space and the wherewithal than the planting of borders or quarters with the less progressive flowers. In general, the modest proportions and chaste hues of the older race would be an antidote to the exaggerated force and coarser tone of many of the modern strains, and might suggest a philosophic theory of a balance of losses and gains. Amongst roses, set a Madame Plantier against Frau Karl Druschki, and the candid mind will

note how the substance and the emphasis of color are developed at the expense of more recondite qualities, which may be found at the full in the dog-rose of the hedges. The retrospective gardens might be furnished on several different plans; one arrangement might admit only plants enrolled in authentic poetry-let us say (for English soil) from Chaucer to Shelley and Tennyson: the authorizations and rejections would make an instructive collection. Another plot might be a sort of almshouse for obsolescent and vanishing kinds, or might attempt by selection to reproduce the garden of a past period. Necessarily the surroundings should be simple and as much as possible in keeping with the archaic flowers. Straight borders three or four yards wide, beside a walk of rough flagstones or scythe-mown grass, would be best, with as much as is practicable of cottage-garden atmosphere about them, wherein everything by a simplecunning art looks as though it had grown there by itself for a hundred years. Any attempt at "old-worldliness" in the way of builders' work, topiary art or other devices, is certain to destroy the value of the experiment at once.

In the choice of subjects there is of course room for а considerable range of personal likings and knowledge. One man might include, for instance, the long-spurred hybrid aquilegias, careless of the fact that they are the extremely modern representatives of the old blue, white and murrey-colored columbines which are but a short step from the native form. Another might admit the primitive dahlias with globular quilled heads and exclude the later developments of the "cactus" class, though the ancestor of both only reached England a little more than a century ago. The literary gardening which has of late years become such a well-worked province

has an influence on selections of this kind. When, for instance, a writer like M. Maeterlinck, in the essays1 recently published in English with the advantage of reproductions in color of some very pretty drawings by Mr. Elgood, discourses upon old-fashioned flowers, the ordinary gardener may be prepared to find the classification a very personal one and rather fitted for fantastic pleasaunces of faëry than for the grudging soil of our material plots. When flowers are made to twitter and lisp, and take the forms of eager carpets or motionless dances, it is small wonder to find the ageratum, the zinnia, evenproh pudor!-the blue lobelia in the class of "old-fashioned flowers" in company with the buttercup and the pansy. The reader who is puzzled to know why the phlox is called "paternal" may guess the solution when he finds the epithet serving as well for a windmill, and will understand how an author who in his first essay declares his love for the simplest, the commonest, the oldest and the most antiquated flowers, in the last adores the exhibition chrysanthemum as "the most submissive, the most docile, the most tractable and the most attentive plant of all . . . . impregnated through and through with the thought and will of man." That the imaginative handling of garden catalogues has its own dangers our own recent growth of literary hybrids sufficiently shows.

A return to the cultivation of neglected and moribund strains of flowers would be most profitable if it increased in any degree the power to hold the balance between the past and the present, between grace and force, between such hedge-bottom vagrants as the "fast-fading violets covered up

1" Old-fashioned Flowers, and other Openair Essays." By Maurice Maeterlinck. Translated by A. Teixeira de Mattos. With Illustrations by G. S. Elgood. London: George Allen. 1906. 38. 6d. net.

in leaves" and the Tsars and Wellsianas on their eight-inch stalks under the lights of the frame. A habit of The Saturday Review.

discrimination thus encouragea might be often serviceable beyond the garden bounds.

BOOKS AND AUTHORS.

No time has been lost in pressing the suffragette into the service of fiction. Messrs. Chatto announce "A Suffragette's Love-letters," which is described as "a discreet transcription from the letters of a very sprightly young lady who was swept for a time into the suffragist movement, half against her will."

"An American Girl in India" is the title of a book by Shelland Bradley, author of "The Doings of Berengaria," which will shortly be published by Messrs. Bell. It gives a humorous picture of Anglo-Indian life, and describes the brilliant pageant of Lord Curzon's great Durbar from an American point of view.

Strange as it may appear, no thorough and exhaustive life of Captain Cook has appeared since 1836, although much new information concerning his life and adventures has come to light since then. The "Life and Adventures of Captain Cook, R. N.," by Arthur Kitson, which Mr. John Murray has in the press, is an attempt to fill this gap, and gives a full record of his life, and his active service in the war in Canada in 1759, and of his voyages round the world.

Mr. James Bissett Pratt's "Psychology of Religious Belief" deserves attention because it is something more than a piece of speculative philosophy, being in part a summary of the answers received from persons to whom the author submitted a series of pene

trating questions. It must be said in defence of his use of this effective but possibly dubious way of obtaining information, that nothing could be more guarded and delicate than his way of using it, and taken with his own speculations it constitutes a remarkable and valuable little book. The Macmillan Company.

Mr. Burdett Coutts announces that he is engaged in writing a life of the Baroness Burdett Coutts. He is not going to pay so much attention to the public aspect of her life, which has received adequate notice in the public press for many years past, as to that of which much remains to be told and more explained. Mr. Burdett Coutts laments that there is no one remaining, no Dickens or Disraeli, who, combining the finest literary art with long and intimate personal knowledge, could give an adequate characterstudy. He will therefore concentrate his attention on the facts of her life.

Mr. Ellis Barker's "The Rise and Decline of the Netherlands" is intended to be both a history, and a warning to the British statesman and economist, and to that end it carefully analyzes the causes by which the once powerful state of the Netherlands fell from its former position, and descended to its present rank. Also, it is intended as an exposure of certain fallacies as to commercial relations possible and actual, accepted because analogically attractive, but without fundamental support in history or in logic. It is

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