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Show A STRANGE MIXTURE. The world has never perhaps beheld such a combination of incongruous elements ele-ments as the Russian Empire presents today. to-day. The jeducated classes include some of the best informed and of the most highly polished men and women in Europe, many-of whom openly express ideas of an "advanced liberal type. They include also- an intellectual proletariat which has embraced, with all the ardor of the Slav nature, the wildest and most dangerous theories of French and German socialists. These men have the tastes and the ambitions which education brings, with no reasonable prospect of gratifying lther. Bfineath is the dumb peasant order, or-der, permeated here Rnd there with the new ldea3J which the villagers who have migrated to the newly-established manufacturing manu-facturing centers or who have come In contact wjth the artisans and the urban workmen iin the army bring home with them. Oyer all the buerauo-acy and the police exercise what is too. often in practice prac-tice an Irresponsible sway. The church in her own sphere Is as Intolerant and as unenlightened as the State. Most ominous of all, the economic conditions of nobles, of manufacturers and artisans and of the agricultural masses appear to be becoming becom-ing more and more grievous. The moat enlightened men of the empire deplore the evils they daily witness, and recognize that profound constitutional reforms are indispensable to remedy them. Yet they are acutely conscious of the dangers which such reforms must almost necessarily necessar-ily bring, and they have so far failed to devtee any known project which promises to effect the transition from the half-Oriental, half-Oriental, half-mediaeval state, which Russia Rus-sia now is, to conditions essential for the development of modern life and civilization. civiliza-tion. London Times. . - |