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"the Supreme, Autocratic power belongs to the All-Russian Emperor," and repeated the ancient formula:"Obedience to his authority, not only for wrath but alsofor conscience sake, is ordained by God Himself.''Tsarism operated through the landowning class, thearmy and police, the bureaucracy, and the church.The landowning class, which in the eighteenth centurybecame substantially an 'estate' of the nobility andgentry somewhat similar to that in the German countries,despite divisions within itself dominated, directly orindirectly, in the army and the bureaucracy until thelatter half of the nineteenth century. By then it wasrapidly losing ground in face of the great developmentof Western economic and industrial influences.Half a century after the emancipation of the serfs(1861) the old fabric sustaining the autocracy wasrevealed in the Russo-Japanese war (1904-5) and the1905 Revolution as so undermined that the tsar, confrontedwith the alternative of military "dictatorship orentry on to the path of a constitution," was reluctantlycompelled to choose the latter course and issue theOctober Manifesto (30th October 1Q05), equivalent toa constitutional charter. The five liberties of person,conscience, speech, meeting and association, which hadbeen clamorously demanded in a general civilian strike,were conceded, though only in very general terms. AnAil-Russian representative assembly, the Duma, was toshare some legislative power with the tsar. But at leasthe had forestalled a constituent assembly; he had himselfprescribed the powers of the Duma and had laiddown the fundamental laws; what he had granted hemight withdraw or modify. Witte, the prime ministerand author of the October Manifesto, congratulatedhimself that there was "a constitution, but a conservativeconstitution and without parliamentarism." Nicholas,like his father and grandfather, shared the opinion ofPobedonostsev, the arch-conservative mentor of tsars,that "it is terrible to think of our condition if destinyhad sent us the fatal gift—an All-Russian Parliament."In certain respects the 1905 Revolution was theRussian counterpart to the 1848 revolutions in Austria68