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184 The Mohammedans, twenty-eight in number, inclined towards the left.

The second duma lasted but a few days longer than the first, from March 5th to June 16, 1907. It was natural that superstitious persons should regard it as a sign of ill omen when on March 15th the ceiling of the chamber fell in. Apart from this, thoughtful politicians and good observers had reason to expect that in the case of the second duma also the vital threads would soon be cut. From the outset it was the aim of the right to provoke the majority by reactionary and partisan proposals and to demonstrate that the duma was unworkable.

On June 1st the government demanded suspension of parliamentary immunity in the case of sixteen deputies who were declared to be criminal conspirators, and demanded further that thirty-nine members of the Social Democratic Party should be excluded from the house. The committee appointed to discuss the question was unable to come to a decision, and on June 16th the second duma was dissolved by a manifesto from the tsar, who adduced various grounds of censure, among which the chief were that the duma refused to express condemnation of murders and acts of violence and refused to surrender conspirators against the state and the throne.

On the day of the dissolution the government arbitrarily issued a new electoral law. The number of deputies was reduced to 437; the suffrage of the towns, the operatives, and the peasants (nearly half the electors), was enormously reduced, whilst the power of the landed gentry and the zemstvo bureaucracy was greatly increased. The third duma, therefore, was predominantly aristocratic, a duma of conservative great landowners. The party of the right, and the centre comprising the Octobrists (107), together controlled nearly three-fourths of the votes; the cadets (56) and the greatly reduced radicals and revolutionaries had become a small minority; in addition the cadets had lost a number of their best men. The social democrats held no more than seventeen seats, the Labour Party and the young narodniki no more than sixteen, whilst the social revolutionaries had boycotted the third duma. The economic crisis of 1906 found its logical continuation in 1907. Once more the crops failed in many administrative districts; the effects of the industrial crisis were manifested in several strikes; and, in the south, to all these evils was superadded an epidemic of cholera. The extent to which