Many a man who could face a rain of bullets without a tremor, would quail and turn coward if subjected to the same test before such a cumulative force of opinion.
But this is not a crisis to be settled in the Council-Chamber, nor to be decided by convincing arguments, but by the march of events.

And events were not slow in coming.
The assassination of the Grand Duke Sergius, uncle of the Tsar, and the most extreme of the reactionaries at Moscow, of which he was governor, was the most powerful argument yet presented for a change of direction in the Government; and others were near at hand.
The derangement of industrial conditions induced by the war pressed heavily upon the wage-earners; and the agitation upon the surface, the threatened explosions here and there, were only an indication of the misery existing in the deeps below.

At all industrial centres there were strikes accompanied by the violence which invariably attends them.
On the morning of Sunday, Jan.

22d, an orderly concourse of workmen, in conformity with a plan already announced, were on their way to the Winter-Palace bearing a petition to the "Little Father," who, if he only knew their wrongs, would see that justice was done them.

So they were going to tell him in person of their grievances.