514Chapter 26
new king, George V (reigned 1910–36), and asked him
to support them in defending the prerogatives of the
House of Commons. George V reluctantly promised to
ennoble four hundred commoners (enough new peers
to create a Liberal Party majority in the House of
Lords) if the Conservative nobles did not back down.
Forced to choose between surrendering their obstruc-
tionist power and the prospect of Lloyd George selling
hundreds of titles to the highest radical bidder, the To-
ries capitulated. The result was the Parliament Act of
- The House of Lords surrendered its claim to
power over the budget and lost its absolute veto over
all legislation. The Lords retained a suspensive veto;
they could delay a law by vetoing it for two consecu-
tive years, but they could not block a bill on its third
passage of the Commons.
This democratization of Parliament raised Irish
hopes for home rule because they still had the support
of a liberal majority in the House of Commons. When
the third Home Rule Bill sailed through the House of
Commons in 1912, again to be vetoed in the House of
Lords, it seemed certain that Ireland would receive self-
government in 1914. Protestants in northern Ireland
warned of civil war. Ironically, a war of another kind
blocked home rule: World War I began in 1914, shortly
before home rule would have become law, and Liberals
suspended the issue until the war’s end. The Irish felt
betrayed by the British political system and would rise
up during the war in the Easter Rebellion of 1916.
Though the Irish did not win self-government until
1920, the Liberals had tried harder on their behalf than
they had for women’s rights. The first women’s suffrage
debate in Parliament (1867) and the right of women to
vote in local elections (1869) had arrived before the
first Home Rule Bill (1886), but neither of the major
parties was willing to adopt the cause of votes (or can-
didacy) for women. Gladstone consciously chose to ex-
clude women’s suffrage from his electoral reform bill
(1884). Thus, as suffragism became a widespread issue
across Europe, Britain seemed scarcely closer to change
in 1906 than thirty years earlier.
Imperial Russia on the Eve
of Revolution
The Russian Empire remained markedly different from
Britain, France, and Germany in the late nineteenth
century. Despite the abolition of serfdom in 1861, Rus-
sian society was more typical of the Old Regime than
of the industrialized liberal democracies of western Eu-
rope. Ninety percent of the population still lived in a
rural world. Urbanization was so slight in 1870 that
capitals such as Helsinki (twenty-six thousand) or Kiev
(seventy-one thousand) remained mere towns. Despite
the reforms of the Alexandrine age, Russia remained a
peasant society ruled by aristocratic landowners unre-
strained by a parliament, a constitution, or a bill of
rights. The distribution of land at emancipation had not
created a class of peasant landowners with small farms.
More than 80 percent of the peasant land in Russia was
owned communally (although some regions, such as
Lithuania, had significant private ownership). These
communal farms of the late nineteenth century fell
short of western standards; a study of 1900 found that
83 percent of all peasants still used wooden plows.
Russian backwardness produced many tragedies,
such as the killing of Alexander II in 1881. An old witti-
cism of European statecraft said that Russia was “an ab-
solute monarchy tempered by regicide.” That remark
became somewhat less amusing after 1879, when a
group of radicals founded a revolutionary society
named the People’s Will (Narodnaia Volia). Their pro-
gram resembled democratic socialism in the west (a
Russian Parliament, universal suffrage, freedom of
speech and the press, peasant ownership of the land,
and worker control of the factories), but their chief ac-
tivity was assassination. The People’s Will made five un-
successful attempts to kill Alexander II, including
burrowing under railroad tracks to blow up his train,
before succeeding on their sixth attempt.
The murdered czar’s son, Alexander III (reigned
1881–94), had the Romanov family’s extraordinary
height (6′ 6 ′′in a world where the average height was
below 5′ 6 ′′) and exceptional strength (he once intimi-
dated a statesman at the dinner table by tying a piece of
silverware into a knot) but none of the liberal senti-
ments that had made his father the most significant
Russian reformer of the century. Alexander III’s mind
had been shaped by his chief adviser, Konstantin
Pobedonostsev, a deeply conservative, antidemocratic
man who opposed the westernization of Russia as de-
structive of national traditions. His official position as
procurator of the holy synod (minister of religion) en-
abled him to state the regime’s philosophy. He taught
that popular sovereignty was “among the falsest of po-
litical principles” and that universal suffrage was “a fatal
error, and one of the most remarkable in the history of
mankind” (see document 26.3). Pobedonostsev and the
head of the secret police, Vyacheslav Plehve, presided
over a police state that cracked down on dissident
groups. They tightened censorship, established firmer
control over schools, and reduced the independence of