influence of the Polish Prince Adam Czartoryski, Alexander I. encouraged education and enterprise. The cultural influence of Vilna University produced the poet Mickiewicz and others.
In the closing years of Alexander's reign events in Poland cast their shadow before them, and in answer to political conspiracies Novosiltsov, formerly adviser to the Grand Duke Constantine as governor of Poland, upon his transfer to Lithuania initiated the persecution of liberal thought. Under the new Tsar, Nicholas I., the plan of the reunion of the two states was definitely rejected, his ukase of 1839 making of Lithuania the " Sievero-Zapadny Krai " (North-western Province).
As a result of the Polish rebellion of 1830, in which the peasantry, whether Lithuanian, Polish or White Russian, did not take so great a part as the upper classes, the university of Vilna was abolished in 1832, its faculties being transferred in bulk to Kiev and in part to Kharkov and St. Petersburg; Catholic and Uniate Church property sequestrated from 1836 onwards; the Lithuanian Statute, which had remained the law of the land through four centuries of union with Poland, replaced by the Russian code in 1840, while prominent natives, debarred from public service in their own country, were forced to emigrate or exiled to Siberia. Even the reign of Alexander II. bringing no changes in Lithuania and only slight modifications in the kingdom of Poland, the revolutionary spirit led to the great rebellion of 1863.
This abortive insurrection in which the Polish nobility and intelligentsia were primarily involved, though the Lithuanians also took a prominent part, led to the suppression of the printing of Lithuanian books by the dictator Gen. Muraviov, which measure was only abolished in 1904.
The Tsarist policy was henceforth perfectly consistent in that it strove to make Lithuania a genuine part of Russia and sought to extirpate Polish culture beyond the frontiers of the kingdom. Under these circumstances began in 1864 the great persecution of the " croy- ance Polonaise," as the Catholic faith was called. However fiercely conducted, it failed, though the Uniate Church with slighter powers of resistance was now completely forced into Orthodoxy, its cere- monial being definitely forbidden and its monasteries dissolved. The attack upon Polish property by the edict of 1865, though never fully applied, prevented the increase of Polish-owned estates for 40 years. The additional taxation of 5 % on all incomes derived from land, imposed in 1869 and not repealed until the reign of Nicholas II., together with the suppression of the Polish language in all official .matters, served the same ends. By way of reprisal land was taken Jfrom Polish owners and given to Russians, and settlements were established for colonization purposes a measure of this kind taking place as late as 1913 so that proportionately more convicts and political exiles were sent into Lithuania than even into Siberia. The abolition of serfdom without cancellation of the peasants' preroga- tives as to pasturage and timber rights served to accentuate class- antagonism. Further, Lithuania was specially excluded from the Zemstvo system which was introduced into Russia in 1864. ' An early expression of reviving Lithuanian national consciousness .was the appearance of the newspaper " Ausra," which, printed in East Prussia, lived for three years, though even in that short period its editor, banished from Germany, had to take refuge at Prague. It was socially significant that he and his political col- laborators were drawn of the stock of newly emancipated peasants.
In Prussian Lithuania a craftier policy allowed greater outward liberty, though the process of German colonization, seconded by persecution, restricted the Lithuanian language which was once dominant in East Prussia to barely five districts (Tilsit 38%, Heydekrug 61-9%, Memel 47-1 %, Ragnit 27%, Labiau 30%).
Period of Popular Representation, 1905-14. Russia's defeat in the Russo-Japanese War and the revolution which followed in its wake led, in Sept. 1905, to a measure of reform in the Russian system of government in Lithuania. The first National Lithuanian Assembly, which, however, in the eyes of the Tsar's Government was merely a revolutionary body tolerated for the time being, met at Vilnius (Vilna). It consisted of two thousand delegates who demanded autonomy for the four governments of Vilna, Kovno, Grodno and Suvalki under a Diet at Vilna to be elected by universal, direct, equal and secret franchise. It was the first modern attempt to define Lithuania ethnograph- ically, to respect national minorities and continue the connexion with Russia upon the federative principle.
The Tsar's Government under the electoral statute of 1905 granted the four-class franchise (landowners, peasants, towns- men and workmen) in such wise as to favour the rural population. Only Poles were elected to the first Duma in 1906.
As the imperial ukase which followed the dissolution of the second Duma in 1907 conferred more power upon the great landowners, it was modified as regards Lithuania by a nationality clause which provided that the total of electors of each class should be in proportion to the amount of land possessed by
the respective nationalities in the district. This measure, applied by Russian officials, was designed against the Poles and the Lithuanian Nationalists alike, for not even the Pro- gressives who favoured autonomy for Poland contemplated its grant to Lithuania. In the third Duma the five delegates allotted to the non-Russian population of Vilna government were all Poles who joined the Polish party; in Kovno government three delegates were Lithuanians, one was a Pole and one a Jew.
War Period, 1914-20. The outbreak of the World War in 1914 led to a German invasion which, from midsummer 1915 until Aug. 1919, lay heavily upon the land, which was ruthlessly exploited. To further their own purpose, which was the lasting hold over Lithuania, the Germans after the military collapse of Russia allowed the phantom existence of a State. While a Lithuanian conference met at Vilna (Sept. 18-23 1 9 I 7), and, in negotiations which dragged until March 1918, petitioned the then German Chancellor, Count Hertling, for the restoration of the country's independence under condition of a perpetual alliance between it and the German Empire (" Bundesverha.lt- nis "), the German clerical party caused the " Taryba," or Council of State, which was then unavoidably still largely under the control of their army of occupation authorities, to offer the Lithuanian crown to Prince William of Urach, a younger member of the Wurttemberg reigning family. On July n 1918 he accepted under the title of " Mindove II., King of Lithuania," thus strangely choosing the style of a heathen prince of the I3th century who fiercely resisted the Teutonic order.
While the opposition of the German annexationists thwarted this candidature which the Council of State eventually can- celled (Nov. 2 1918), their delegates at the peace negotiations of Brest Litovsk, in March 1918, on the contrary upheld against Trotsky the authority of the Lithuanian Council of State despite the fact that they had previously refused to regard it as the " legal representative of Lithuania." Their last argument rested upon this, that "Germany had recognized Lithuania's independence only on the condition that the conventions to be concluded, among them, of course, the form of constitution and the choice of a ruler, shall correspond to German inter- ests " (Nordd. Allgem. Zeitung, Aug. 1918).
By Nov. 1918, the magnitude of Germany's defeat being no longer in doubt, the Taryba, or Council of State, promulgated a provisional constitution under which it became the Lithuanian Parliament. The supreme power was vested in three persons, A. Smetona, J. Staugaitis, and St. Silingas, who on Nov. 51918 invited Prof. Voldemar to form the first independent adminis- tration on non-party lines and reach an understanding with the national minorities resident within the still indeterminate frontiers, viz. White Russians, Poles, Jews and Great Russians. Alone the Pan-Polish party reverted irreconcilably to the historic solution of union or federation with Poland. The initial diffi- culties of setting up an administrative machine on national lines were the greater as the troops of the occupying Power, affected by the revolution which had broken out in Germany, engaged in pillage and highway robbery, which a national militia as yet barely armed had to suppress. The German troops were to a large extent composed of men who had been on the eastern front for some time, who had never themselves suffered defeat by the Allies, and were therefore indisposed to admit them- selves beaten. They behaved in the most high-handed, brutal and truculent manner. Although Kovno itself was evacuated in June 1919, and shortly afterwards southern and eastern Lithuania, the area Mitau-Shavli-Taurogen remained in their hands until Dec. 13 of that year. In their withdrawal, by a historic disregard of fair play, the Germans not merely refused to put at the disposal of the Lithuanian authorities the neqes- sary means of defence, but under a military convention allowed the Bolshevist troops to march into evacuated zones at a mean distance of 10 kilometres. They were by this procedure, more- over, directly violating the terms of the Armistice concluded with the Entente Powers on Nov. n 1918. Thus in lieu of the Ger- man appeared the Bolshevist menace.
The Voldemar administration resigned on Dec. 26 1918. the
