In commenting on the murder of the Grand Duke Sergius most of the newspapers deem it their duty to declare that assassination cannot in any circumstances be justified; but nearly all of them go on to qualify this moral sentiment by pointing out that crimes of this kind are the inevitable consequence of a cruel despotism, and to insinuate that if ever a man could be said to deserve assassination it was the Grand Duke Sergius. But the man in the street is less strongly imbued with Christian feeling or less hypocritical, There were, of course, no unseemly demonstrations of delight but nowhere did one hear a word of regret ora word of reprobation of the man who was ready to sacrifice his life in order to remove the arch-enemy of the people. For the Grand Duchess Elizabeth, the daughter of our Princess Alice and sister of Princess Louis of Batten-berg, there is of course nothing but sympathy—a sympathy intensified by the universal belief that she had been a grossly ill-used wife. Moreover the Czar's assent to the convocation of the Zemski Sober is pointed to as a direct refutation of the theory that no great political end is ever achieved by assassin nation.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.