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functions and together with the police were the mainrulers of the peasantry, until a law of 1912 modifiedtheir position. A like fate (1892) befell the electedmunicipal councils which had been set up in 1870 onsimilar lines to the zemstva. A very high franchisequalification was now imposed, with a three-class system,and the municipal councils were even more tightlycontrolled from the centre than before.Despite the opposition of the bureaucracy, however,the practice of local self-government and activitiesof voluntary associations had made headway in thehalf-century before 1917. The work accomplished bythe zemstva and many municipal councils had beenremarkable, particularly in education, public health, andagriculture. Immediately before and during the 1905Revolution they emerged as a prominent political forceon the side of liberalism through the new device ofAil-Russian congresses, and after 1914 they playedthe outstanding part in struggling with the war brganizationof the rear. They had great popularity amongthe liberals and the professional classes in general, butlittle appeal outside of them. They were the indispensableelement in the process, but just begun after1905, of transforming tsarism into some kind of modernmonarchy, but in 1917, without any tsar or any reliablearmy, they proved powerless to act with the Duma as thecorner-stones of a new regime.If local self-government had thin roots, nationalrepresentation had only memories. Russians had tohark back to the seventeenth century for any parallel tothe Duma as an elected, representative body on a nationalscale limiting the power of autocracy.Alexander II on the very eve of his assassination (1881)had secretly agreed to new consultative commissions,with a small elected element from the zemstva, whichmight perhaps have been a fruitful seed of development,but his murder immediately caused his son, Alexander III,to renounce any such dangerous idea and to proclaimthat it was God's command that he should govern "infaith in the strength and truth of the autocratic power,which We are called to fortify and preserve for the78