Page:Russian Realities and Problems - ed. James Duff (1917).djvu/52

 their voice is drowned in that of the majority. You can imagine the result. The landed proprietors, of course, elect such peasants as are likely to comply with their interests, which gives to the Duma the worst representation of the peasant class. This explains how it could happen in the third and fourth Dumas that the peasants entirely changed their position. They had been in the ranks of opposition in the first and the second Duma; they now sit on the benches of the Government parties. It is not quite so bad with working-men, because every representative of the working-men is invariably a Socialist in Russia. Thus it is quite impossible for the capitalists to elect a non-Socialist member. Russia is the only place in the world, I suppose, where the "bourgeois" and the "junkers" are obliged to elect Socialist members.

I must add, first, that every citizen who enjoys the right to vote may at any time, under this or that particular pretext, which are unhappily too many to be enumerated here, be struck off the electoral list; and, secondly, that if a majority in a District or Provincial assembly is not quite to the taste of the Government, the local authorities have the right to redistribute the voters, and in such a way as to secure artificial majorities. If you consider all these things, you may wonder how it happens that in spite of all there is still an opposition in the Duma, and that this opposition even formed one-third of the third and the fourth Dumas. The answer is, first, that the six large cities which have the direct-vote have always elected opposition members; and, in the second place, owing to the peculiarly democratic composition of the population