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Filing Systems SECTIONS.

Grow with Your Business.

By the adoption of the "SHANNON" Building - up System you can combine Letter Filing and Card Indexing in One Cabinet. It does not matter if you have One

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THE

REVIEW OF REVIEWS

THE WORLD.

THE PROGRESS OF THE

Light at Last.

LONDON, May 1st, 1905. At last there is light dimly visible in the Cimmerian gloom which has so long hung over Russia like a pall. It is but a faint light, but it presages the dawn. The military situation seems to be as bad as ever, the financial position shows no improvement, domestic affairs seem to be almost desperate. No great man capable of command has emerged from the millions. But at long last the conviction seems to be dawning upon the Russian mind that the soul of man must be free, and that the State in enslaving the Church has paralysed the mainspring of progress. The lack of political liberty is bad. But the denial of religious liberty is ten times

worse.

The memorial which M. Witte recently presented to the Tsar on the subject of the Russian Orthodox Church, starts from the assumption that religious liberty is to be granted to all Russian Nonconformists, and follows this up by a bold and well-reasoned plea for the restoration of liberty to the Established Church. For the moment nothing came of it. But everything may come of it. The Church itself seems to be stirring beneath its bonds. The bureaucratic police system imposed by Peter the Great upon the Greek Orthodox Church has been like the ice with which the Russian winter covers the waters of the Neva. The living water is still there, but navigation is stopped, the surface is as hard as iron and as cold. Not until spring-time does the ice melt and the river is restored to the use of man. The Russian winter is long, but the winter of the Russian Church has lasted two hundred years. What matters that, however, if now at last, after all these weary years, the Church of the living God is about to be roused from slavery and death.

Religious Liberty at last.

On the eve of the May Day which was to have witnessed all manner of bloody disorders, on the morning of the Russian Easter, the Tsar published a decree which, standing side by side. with the Rescript which led to the Hague Conference, will place him-all his indecision notwithstanding on a higher pedestal of glory in the Temple of Fame than that to which any contemporary sovereign can lay claim. For since, in Whittier's phrase, Alexander the Second "With the pencil of the Northern Star Wrote Freedom o'er his land," there has been no such beneficent revolution effected as that which the Tsar accomplished when he proclaimed absolute religious liberty to his subjects, be they Nonconformist, Roman Catholic, or Buddhist. The decree is so comprehensive, so thorough-going, so revolutionary in the best sense of the word, that we can only hold our breath with awe and gratitude. And one of the best results of this Imperial decree is that it will entail as a corollary the extension of religious liberty to the Orthodox Church as well as to its Dissenting rivals. It is seventeen years since I ventured to plead, and plead entirely in vain, with Alexander the Third and M. Pobyedonostseff for some slight instalment of this great act of emancipation. Now that it has come in full measure, we can only thank God and take courage, and keep on hoping that Nicholas II. may be spared to carry out yet other reforms. But if he lived to be a hundred years old, he could do nothing greater than the two achievements by which he will live in history.

The

Russian Church.

"It takes a soul to move a body," said Mrs. Browning, "even to a cleaner stye." And until the soul of the Russian nation awakes, until the Church—including in that term not merely

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